How to use the routing slips within Patient Flow
Patient Flow helps you track your patients through your operatories, and allows you to communicate with your team throughout the practice. For each patient on your schedule, they will have a Routing Slip for additional notation and tracking. This feature, while available on the Practice by Numbers website, works best on the desktop app where we can generate custom notifications.
To get started, you can open Patient Flow by selecting the Operations button at the bottom left of any page in PbN, or selecting its icon on the left of the desktop app.
That will pull up the Patient Flow menu, where you can view the current status of each of the current and upcoming patients. To the right of every patient, there is a small icon that if selected will open up the Routing Slip.
Within the slip, starting from the top you will see the patient's Name, DOB, PMS alerts, Last Service Dates, and PbN Alerts. The PbN alerts are specific for that appointment and routing slip, so they won't be permanently attached to their patient file. When you select Add Alert + you will have a list of options such as arrived late, is upset, is nervous, or been waiting a while. These are default options, but they can all be customized in the settings.
For the Last Service Dates, it will only display appointments types you have selected in the Patient Flow Settings, so by default it will not be displaying every type of appointment.
Below that information you will see appointment related information including the date/time, appointment notes, and codes. If the patient is scheduled for multiple back-to-back appointments, you can select which one you are viewing on the same routing slip.
You can used the checkboxes to the left of each service code to indicate it wasn't completed, and then under Additional Codes you can add in anything that was completed but not original scheduled.
The Appointment Notes come directly from your PMS, but the Additional Notes are specific to this appointment's routing slip. This can be used to note anything you would like others to see as they move from check in, operatory, and check out. Note that this field will not write anything back to your PMS.
Towards the bottom of the slip, there are three drop-downs for Next Visit, Dispense/Sell, and Referrals. These can be used to note things to be done during checkout, the available options can also be settings.
Whenever you make a change to the slip, hit Save at the bottom right to submit the changes
Once saved, back on the Patient Flow page, the routing slip icon will have red triangle which indicates a change was made to the slip. If you mouse over the icon, it will open a small open window giving an overview of any changes made to the slip, without even having to open the full window.
How to View Previous Routing Slips
There are two ways to view a patients routing slip from a previous visit. First, through Patient Flow, at the top of the page you can change the date. If you navigate to a previous date, each of the patients that day will be listed under completed appointments, with the routing slip icon still available.
You can also find each previous visits routing slip within the Patient Information Window. You can pull up a patient's information either by selecting their name from almost anywhere in PbN, or by searching for their name at the top right.
With the information window open navigate to the Account tab, and you will see a list of appointment history with the routing slip for each one of their appointments.
Overview Video