MedLook Weekly Tip For 03/05/2007

The Options dialog has some nice features for quickly and conveniently setting default values when entering data for new patients. The first item is Patient Status. By default these values include Active and Inactive with Active (the first item) being the default. However, this list can be expanded to include anything with the default always being the first value. So the list could be "Active,Inactive,Collections".

Likewise, the Title is set to be "Mr.,Mrs.,Miss,Mr. & Mrs." with Mr. being the default. For a pediatrician you probably wouldn't even want to bother with using the Title so you can change this to default to nothing by adding a just a comma at the beginning as ",Mr.,Mrs.,Miss,Mr. & Mrs.".

The Employment field is set to "Full Time,Part Time,Retired,Non-Employed" but again can be changed to anything (including nothing as noted above). One special note on this field though: the first character must be unique for each entry as that's all the database supports at this time. Also the "Full Time,Part Time,Retired,Non-Employed" fields should always be present as they are used for Box 8 of the CMS 1500 form.

The Marital Status field is set to "Single,Married,Other" with Single being the default. Again, this can be changed to include fields such as "Divorced" or nothing. Like the Employment field this field must have a unique first character.

The Student Status field is set to "N/A,Full Time,Part Time" with N/A being the default. This field is similar to those immediately above as well.

The remainder of the defaults have distinct Yes/No or Male/Female settings and are fairly straight forward.

Below is a view of the Options dialog showing the New Patient Default Settings.

If you use the Options to your best advantage you can really speed up entering new patient data.