Calendar Views For Contacts

[Gregory Winters]

The easiest way to get this across would be to simply describe the situation
- it's fairly straightforward. Doctor's office has staff assigned in the
domain, each with their own Exchange mailbox. Obviously, they all have their
own calendars, so the Front Desk personnel can easily call these up and
arrange them on the desktop so that when a patient calls in and asks for an
appointment, the user can see which staff person is available and book the
appointment accordingly.

Here's the rub...

Patients in this line of medicine are parts of a complex treatment program
which consists of different staff members, different tests and appointment
types, different series of logical flows, etc., and it can get quite
difficult to manage it all. There are times when the Patients call the
office staff and ask questions in regard to their programs and the staff must
struggle with browsing through Outlook to try and get the information.

All of the Patients are given a common dump mail address in Exchange so that
'messages' can be sent to them and the Address Book can function properly,
but it is not feasible to provide them their own mailbox.

What the users would like to be able to do is 'call up' a particular
Patient's appointment schedule - past, present and future - in some sort of
calendar view to review with the Patient. If it isn't a bona fide calendar
interface, per se, can we get anything at all which is Contact-based to show
where a particular Contact has been scheduled, sent appointments, etc., in
the database?

Many thanks in advance,

Greg

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

Which version of outlook? While outlook 2007 might work good for this
scenario (because you can overlay calendars) Outlook in general is probably
not the best for this scenario. Although each contact can display associated
activities, it only shows the ones in the current mailbox.

In this situation a central public folder calendar for scheduling would
probably work best if Outlook don't have Outlook 2007. Custom views filtered
by patient would work good, but not the easiest to implement for each
patient.



** Please include your Outlook version, Account type, and Windows Version
when requesting assistance **

 

[Gregory Winters]

Outlook 2003. Not sure exactly what you're saying here. All patients have a
'current' mailbox - the same one. There is no requirement to see a calendar,
as such, it only needs to reveal their appointment activity, such as a
Journal entry. Are you suggesting a business process workaround?

Why wouldn't the filtered approach for each patient work? I'd need the
ability to see all Patients before I could see one, anyway, correct?

Greg

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

Each patient or each employee has a mailbox? Are you trying to look the
appointments up in the journal or calendar?

If all the patient appointments are in one calendar, create a filtered view
for the patient. However, in reality, Outlook and Exchange is not the best
for scheduling appointments and there is better medical scheduling software
available.



** Please include your Outlook version, Account type, and Windows Version
when requesting assistance **

 

[Brian Tillman]

Outlook 2003. Not sure exactly what you're saying here. All
patients have a 'current' mailbox - the same one. There is no
requirement to see a calendar, as such, it only needs to reveal their
appointment activity, such as a Journal entry.

If they all use the same mailbox, each will be able to see all information.
I would think that might be a HIPPA violation.

 

[Gregory Winters]

Each employee is a proper member of the domain, so the Outlook Front Desk
user can simply stagger their calendars side by side and see all of the
doctors' availablilty for any one day, or expand the view of any individual
doctor's calendar. That's not the problem here.

Each *patient*, however, shares the SAME mailbox because Outlook won't allow
any sort of messaging event to transpire with anyone who does not have a
valid email address. (Since we do not wish to manage actual messages to real
email addresses, we assign each patient to this 'dump' mailbox.)

We will try this filtered view you are referring to, but I'm curious as to
your comments that Outlook and Exchange are not well suited for appointment
scheduling. It would seem to me that this would be a core competency of any
alleged 'contact management' software! I'm aware that there are other
'medical software' solutions out there, but they are proprietary and involve
a great deal of additional cost to purchase and implement.

Greg

 

[Gregory Winters]

Although all patients 'use' the same mailbox, they have no access to the
domain and can never 'see' it. It's simply a repository for Outlook messages
in order to book appointments. There are no HIPAA ramifications.

Think 'day planner' and you will understand what I'm trying to do. Back in
the 'old days,' when you went into a doctor's office and asked for an
appointment, the receptionist got out a big book and thumbed through the
office appointments to be able to see when the next available time slot was.

If the receptionist had modern tools, s/he could simply filter the book
either by doctor or by patient and screen out all other irrelevant
individuals. It's that simple. My question has been: I see how to do this
for those who have calendars by virtue of being members of the domain, but
why can't I do this same thing with those who are not as long as I'm willing
to manage those calendars myself?

The 'filtered view' idea seems worth pursuing, but I'm wondering if there
are any 'cleaner' methods.

Thanks.

Greg

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

Outlook is a contact manager - its not a good patient manager, especially in
a large office. My docs and dentist use an electronic version of the old
appointment book - it may be expensive but it seems to work well without a
lot of effort on the part of the receptionists doing the booking. If it
saves at least 2 minutes each time the receptionist needs to bring up
patient information, the ROI is fairly short.

I'm not sure why you need "messaging events" for patients. Most
professionals who try to use Outlook as an appointment scheduler use public
folders for contacts and the scheduling calendar.

There is no reason why you can't show the patients calendar side by side
with the office staff. A filtered view should work, but it will require
editing the view (or creating a new one) when you need to bring up a
patient. You can save views for frequent patients but there is a limit to
the number of views you can have - I forget if its 50 or 128.



** Please include your Outlook version, Account type, and Windows Version
when requesting assistance **

 

[Gregory Winters]

Outlook wants to communicate with the contacts in its database before it will
allow access to the items in it. If a contact has no email address, then
Outlook won't allow certain elements of the tool to be available for that
contact. Remove an email address from one of your contacts and see how the
menu choices are reduced.

The reason I can't step outside of Outlook for this one calendar piece is
that the entire rest of the database is working just fine: Address Book,
emails, and a custom form which we developed that includes over 100
user-defined fields. Outlook's licenses come with the Exch