How to Flag Patients

Problem patients. You know what I'm talking about. We all have them. Those patients that call with medical emergencies, then fail to make their appointments. Then they reschedule and show up 50 minutes late. Those patients! They're flaky and waste valuable time you could be spending helping other, more reliable patients. However, with so many people in the office each day, it's often hard to remember which ones have a pattern of rescheduling/failing appointments.

No worries, there's an easy way to flag them!

In the Rexpert scheduler, a patient's display notes (if any) appear automatically when scheduling a new appointment). Here are some simple steps to add a flagged note for a problem patient which will appear whenever you are scheduling a new appointment.

First, find the problem patient in Account Registration. Here, I will be using Kitty Meowsmith. Kitty has been a baaaaaaaad patient...

On the Main tab of Account Registration, select the Notes button on the right-hand side of the screen:

Once in account notes, select the New button to create a new note. Kitty is often prone to mood swings and anti-social behavior. She's caused a lot of problems in my house... er... office... I meant office.

So now, I'm going to mark her as a problem patient. In the Message field, I write "Often fails appointments; has rescheduled 3x successively." Write whatever will easily remind you of this patient's habits, but be tactful: you never know who may see these notes, since they can be printed on billing/collection reports, etc. Make sure that the Type field is set to Display and that the Red Flag toggle box is checked. Then press Save.

If there are no other display notes, it's a good idea to spread your message over two note lines and red-flag both, because when the display notes pop up in the scheduler, the first note line, even if red-flagged, will be covered with the dark blue selector bar (see the screenshot below).

Now, whenever I set up a new appointment for Kitty, her Display Notes pop up immediately.

Now I will never forget how many problems Kitty has caused me!

Have you ever had any problem cats... uh... I mean patients? Let us know in the comment section below!

Contributor: Kylie McKenzie Soder