Patient Scheduling Nightmare

[RobBrim]

OK, I have been assigned the charge of sheduling 250+ patients in 5
physical therapy clinics. The system they were using before was a
centralized excel spreadsheet(by centralized I mean the patients were
not seperated by clinic but all lumped into one list, including the
patients that had stopped treatment meaning over 3000 patient entries).
I've changed it to one sheet for each clinic but I still need to keep
track of what studies were conducted for each patient what dates they
had follow up what days they had studies, the current method just
relists the patient once for each visit. Ultimately what I need is a
daily report/schedule with the clinic name its schedule for that day,
th ebody part the patient is being treated for and what studies the
patient has completed.. fortunately iys only 2 doctors but this is
fustrating. Anyolne have any idea of where I should even start?

 

[pietlinden]

Rob,
It's hard to help you without knowing what kind of structure you have.
By reading your description, you have several entities (things) you're
trying to keep track of:
Patients
Clinics
Studies
VisitDates
Doctors

So how do these fit together? Something like

Patients come to a clinic to participate in various studies. Records
are kept for each patient meeting with a Doctor on a VisitDate, and all
Studies the patient participates in generates information, which is
logged...

I would start with a pad of paper and a pencil. Write down the
process/rules. Basically what happens first, since that's pretty easy.
(something like the above). Do something like drawing boxes around the
interesting things in the story. (Things usually are nouns). then
find the verbs that connect the nouns. then you start connecting the
Noun-Verb-Noun links in your drawing. There's a good description of
normalization in Roger Jennings' Access book published by Que. I'm sure
there are others. But step 1 is definitely on paper.