Home Forums Discussions Problems address labels for postcard recalls

Any suggestions of getting patients name and addresses on address labels for recalls. I have patients that always request a postcard for a future f/u, i.e., 4 month f/u , 6 month f/u. I have thought of using Sunday to put patients for a future recall. For example, if a patients wants a 3 month f/u post card remainder, I would use Sunday (a day not schedule for office visits) 2 weeks before the month f/u date. When I come to the Friday before that Sunday, I would have a list of patients to contact. The question is how to use that patient list to generate a mailing address for the self-adhesive address labels. Any suggestions? Thanks.

ahmd,

Wow, your patients must have short memories, lol. But, even if you get one extra WCC, this method would pay for itself.

I looked at a number of ways to do this such as utilizing Excel, Outlook and MailMerge; all very cumbersome and, as usual, with Microsoft, a bit difficult to actually make work. But, I do think I found what would probably be one of the best ways:

Purchase a DYMO 400 Lable Printer. You should be able to get one at Staples, but LabelCity.com has the best price at $84.00, and the best label prices as well. DYMO has incredibly good technical support; usually answer in less than a minute. Installing the software will install the USB2.0 print driver as well as the label printing software.

Go to the admin section of Amazing Charts and click on Import/Export tab and then select "Excel Spreadsheet of Household Address." This was all done in 2003, but I'm sure it would work in Office 2000 or 2007 as well. Export to your desktop or whatever. After exporting, open and choose Save As and save it in .csv (comma separated values). This allows you to easily import it into the DYMO Label Printer address book. When you bring the fields over, make sure to set the fields in an address format -- they go over by default into one line. You will see this when you do it.

At that point, you can us the CTRL key or SHIFT key to select one, many or all of the addresses and print them to address labels in seconds. Obviously, make sure to purchase the address labels rather than the many other types of labels such as file labels, etc. We have five DYMOs, and I tried this; and it worked like a charm.

Exporting the household addresses will work till a new patient is added.
Once a new patient is added, it will need to be reexported again.
Jon should make AC to allow printing labels without the need to export.
Correct me if I am wrong. Most practice management softwares allow address label printing (without the need to export) I believe (not EMRs).

Well, I wrote a fairly detailed post, but the "ghost firewall" and other error messages ate it up.

So, in frustration I will write a short one. Basically my solution is fairly good I think. We are now using it to send out multiple letters to patient. We have to weekly delete the .dal file and reimport which takes about three minutes. The DYMOs print at 55 labels per minute so it's pretty fast.

OK, now it's time to pray this goes through. <G>