Home Forums Discussions Problems Scheduler Dropping Appointments

Version 6.0.9

The nurses/secretaries are claiming that the AC scheduler drops appointments on a fairly regular basis. They will schedule an appointment (no real pattern regarding appt type, or demographic info) lets say for 2 weeks out. The patient will come in with a appt reminder card (we give out every visit), but will not be on the schedule.

We are using paper superbills, and they have begun writing the next appt date on the bill after they schedule it. They then show me when there is a case of an appointment 'dropping'.

Has anyone else had this problem? I have not seen an instance where the appointment 'drops' immediately. In other words, every time they show me the way they are scheduling, the appointment appears how it should while i am standing there. This is apparently happening sometime between then and the day before they are to be seen.

Note: I have not ruled out user error, but on Thursday there were 5 patients who came in w/ appointment cards but werent on the schedule

As newB, I haven't experience with 2 week delay as I am scheduling for today's visit today, however I am noticing that if I have default time set as 15 min, and on the schedule, I change the time to 5 minutes, I cannot see, or bring up the charts with a R click.
Does anyone know whether the schedule module is going to be updated?
p.s. I sent notice of this bug.
Tampabrock you should do the same.
Does anyone have feedback regarding speed of bug fixes?

Tampa,
Personally, I would be surprised if this is a bug.
Some diagnostic thoughts:
Are most of the "drops" scheduled by the same staffer? If so, watch them schedule some "dummy" patients repeatedly and see if you notice an error.
When you use the binoculars under the patient list to see the patient's appointments, do the missing ones show, perhaps as a "DNKA".
Consider going to the audit log (View...admin options...File...Audit log) and filter to view the patient and see if you see them being scheduled, and any other helpful activity.

I don't know how many patients are on your schedule each day, but if 5 appointments in one day are missing, this shouldn't be too difficult to replicate and track down. Consider getting online with AC support and have them watch your staff schedule several appointments, and see if they can pick up a problem which prevents the appointment from actually being scheduled.

Very rarely, we have seen this happen. Maybe 1-2 per month. Seemed to happen more with late evening appointments and I had to question whether the parents may have doctored the card. My receptionist did state that occasionally she may have written the card then gotten busy and not put them on the schedule. We have been searching for a pattern, but have not found one. Overall, it works 99% of the time.

We have had the same thing happen and, after sitting down and talking about it with the staff, have come to the conclusion it is probably user error. Most of the time the scheduler is doing 2-3 things at the same time and either forgets to save the appointment or hands the patient an appointment card and then forgets to enter it in the schedule. I used to get pretty irritated at the staff until I did the first one myself. I answered the phone one evening while I was waiting on a particular call and made an appointment for a patient for the next day. I forgot to save it. When she showed up unannounced to the staff the next day, I got some pretty nasty scowls. I then told them, "Now I understand the problem"

Maybe a user accidentally removed the appointment? This is very easy to do since once you click remove, the program doesn't ask "are you sure?" or anything like that. And after it's removed there's no way to track if a patient ever had an appointment at that time. This happens to us occasionally and is the most likely explanation when someone comes in with an appointment card and no appointment in AC.

For me, there is a "document a changed appointment" window that pops up when you try to delete or remove a program. Not sure if this is something that can be turned on or off, but that might be part an issue if it's not working on your setup.

YES, there is an box in the user preferences (control + U from the main screen or under the Edit menu my preferences, user preferences) that will turn this back on.

Wendell, you're right. I had forgotten that we turned off that preference to "document a changed appointment" because we didn't want that popup every time we reschedule, which happens a lot. But it would be useful if there was a warning just for deleting an appointment.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm not convinced its a bug, and since that one crazy day with 5 'not on schedule', theres only been MAYBE 1 or 2 a day (and none yesterday).

At this point i have a feeling its user error.

JBS: About 30-40 patients per day.
Ill check out the audit log
We have 3 staff who would add appointments. No noticeable majority of 'drops' from a single individual.

Yes, at this point I think the audit log is the best way to track it down. Identify patients where this occurred (by number) and then filter the log to look at that patient for the dates from when the (supposed) scheduling occurred to present. Look to see if the scheduling actually happened. It is hard to imagine that it would have been scheduled and NOT be in the log.