OLS - Building Visit Reasons for your Practice

At NextPatient, building the proper Visit Reason setup is different for every practice and there are many ways to configure them. For example, a single-specialty clinic offering a limited range of services may want a single dropdown menu with just a few options such as ‘New Patient’ and ‘Returning Patient’, whereas a multi-specialty clinic may want an additional dropdown menu to provide options for New or Returning Medical or Cosmetic patients and a second dropdown menu with unique reasons for each initial selection.

Another variable is when there are multiple locations to consider. Do all the locations use the same scheduling options internally? Do they offer the same services? Do providers travel between facilities?

Let us first take a look at how the two menus appear; below you will see our standard, single menu on the left and our two menu version on the right.

Configurable Options:

1. Can I limit which providers appear for different Visit Reasons? Yes, in the configuration, you can specify which providers are applicable to each visit reason ensuring accurate scheduling. See here for more details.

2. If I have multiple locations, will they all display the same Visit Reasons? When configuring which providers are available for each Visit Reason as described in the question above, if a particular site has a Visit Reason that was not selected for any provider, that Visit Reason will be hidden from view on the location’s scheduling widget.

3. What if different providers require different lengths of time for certain Visit Reasons? For some practice management systems such as Athena, the times per provider are driven from your templates. For practice management systems such as Nextech, ModMed PM, AMD, DrChrono and others, we can specify a default time per visit reason and then customize the times per provider for those that differ.

4. Our locations are spread over a large area or differ on the internal appointment types/profiles at some locations; how can this be addressed? In situations where sharing the same configuration is not suitable, we are able to segregate locations into different sub-groups within NextPatient ensuring that the correct interface appointment type/profile configurations are correctly mapped.

   1. How do I decide which locations should be in which sub-group? Whenever possible, if providers travel between sites, those sites should exist within the same sub-group in order to ensure that the Provider Bio Widget works correctly. If a provider is in multiple sub-groups, this widget designed to show all locations for a single provider on their bio or ‘About’ page will not load correctly.