Break Control Button

[Tracey]

I was trying to add a break in the doctors schedule today on the right side of the program at the Blue Box that highlighs as break - but when I clicked onto it it brought me to a patients account to edit a payment - can you tell me what I am doing wrong

[drtech]

:p that button means break or cancel an appointment.....

if you want to put breaks in your schedule, then double click on the employee schedules (edits all schedules actually) below that button and edit your schedule there.

[jamesx2]

We are having problems with people accidentally breaking appointments, which then leads to double bookings. Would it be possible to add breaking appointments to the security so I can restrict ability to use this feature?

[Jorgebon]

You can "un-break" an appointment easily by double clicking on it and then changing the status back to scheduled.
Jorge Bonilla, DMD

[jamesx2]

Yes, but what is happening is the appointment is broken then deleted from the schedule (or moved to unscheduled list) so another patient can be scheduled in the broken appt's spot.

Another option is to move the completed button from between the delete appt and break appt. Maybe move it to the right of those buttons and make it a bit larger. I think the assistants are acidentally clicking on the break appt button instead of complete button. I know it should be obvious to them that they hit the wrong button, but good help is hard to find in china

[drtech]

We had lots of trouble with breaking appointment inadvertently until I added a pop-up question box to ask the user if they really did want to break the appt....but I just tested breaking an appt now and it doesn't ask anymore!(v5.6.11) So i guess that addition was lost somewhere.

If it is OK with everyone, I will add an dialog box back in to confirm if you really want to break the appt or not.

[Tracey]

Thanks DRTECH - i will use give it a try.

[jordansparks]

I removed that. It's annoying.

[drtech]

ahhh, that's where it went

This is a fairly major issue in our office. We had the same problem as jamesx2 before I added that in. Appointments were broken on the schedule and then the patients would show up when we already scheduled someone else because they never really broke the appointment! Somehow appointments were getting broken inadvertently. (and this just happened to me again this week...now I know why since prompt has been removed)

My theory is that if the last button someone clicks on the appointment module is the break appointment button, then that button continues to be highlighted and it is really easy to hit the space bar on the keyboard and then break another appointment inadvertently. I think this happens esp. when people sit down at a computer with the screen off and sometimes they hit the space bar instead of moving the mouse to "wake up" the computer.

What I told my staff to do is make sure they always initial on the appointment when they break it. So, I prev placed a question and then a prompt for notes to handle this. What I really wanted was ONE popup window prompting the user to input a reason why the appointment is broken and initials to be added to the appointment note. This one window would have a cancel button also to help reduce the annoyance of TWO windows i had before. This method eliminates broken appointments with no notes and no real way to know if it is truly broken or not (with no notes entered).

What do you think Jordan?
Anyone else ever have this happen?

[jordansparks]

But a window should come up to prompt user for adjustment fee. I think the problem is that you are not using fees. I will put it back, but only for offices that are not using fees. But I still object to putting broken appointments in Commlog rather than Adj, because those entries will not convert to actual broken appointments when we add that table later. That's why it says "not recommended" in the misc setup.

[drtech]

correct...i forgot about that we were not using the adjustments. I would be fine using an adjustment if we could have an option not to show the broken appointment adjustment on the statements. I would be fine having it in the account, but just not show normally, maybe a checkoff in the statement options window in case you did want to show them.
I would only want the patients to see it maybe if they are bad about keeping appointments. But for our normal patients, it can upset them and we see no reason to cause more questions. Can we do that?

[jordansparks]

Don't you WANT them to know that you are tracking it? In any case, I'm sure we'll allow changing visibility of broken appointments once they get moved into their own table.