Duplicate bookings

wouterswart wrote on Sunday, April 11, 2010:

Is there a way of preventing duplicate appointments on the calendar?  I’m testing OpenEMR and I’ve noticed that you can enter multiple appointments in the same time slots.  Using the new patient, find available slots method doesn’t allow duplicates but directly accessing the calendar does.  How do I prevent users doing this, either by preventing direct access to the calendar or by having the system warn users of duplicates (or even reject the appointments)?

sraj49 wrote on Sunday, April 11, 2010:

Hi Wouterswart,

In a clinic with multiple doctors they book multiple appointments at the same time, so that if one cancels the appointment the other person can fill up the slot. Otherwise they handle both the cases. Cancellation of appointments at the last moment is very normal and Doctors do not want to lose the time slot. Hence multiple appointments is very essential. However we can tun on and turn off this feature may be through Global.

Raj

wouterswart wrote on Sunday, April 11, 2010:

Thanks for the reply Raj.

In our case we’d like to use the system to manage bookings for in-house medicals with our nurses and we don’t need multiple appointments.

Would it be possible to turn off this feature?

Wouter

sinmu wrote on Monday, April 12, 2010:

Hi Raj and Wouterswart

I guess what Raj has said to enable or disable the multiple providers at the global.php.  is this right?

select_multi_providers  to be set to no,  otherwise what do it means in the global.php for this setting

please advise

thank you

sinmu

wouterswart wrote on Wednesday, April 14, 2010:

I tried changing the setting but it doesn’t solve my problem.

Any way of preventing access to the calendar directly via acl’s?

emrtech wrote on Saturday, April 17, 2010:

I entered 2 appointments in same time slot.  Only the last one appears, so could be a problem with a receptionist not seeing the first appointment and taking up time to solve the problem.  You can generate an appointment report, which will show both.

sinmu wrote on Sunday, April 18, 2010:

It is more an issue of developer problem, maybe we could bring that to the developer part.

visolveemr wrote on Tuesday, April 20, 2010:

Hi,

We didn’t faced any issues when we entered 2 appointments in same slot. Two appointment are shown up in calendar adjacently.

Please check whether the 2 appointments you have added are to the same provider and check the calendar of the provider to which you have added the appointments.

Could you please specify the version?

Thanks,
VicarePlus Team,
www.vicareplus.com

aperezcrespo wrote on Tuesday, April 20, 2010:

Hi
  If you have mutiple provider columns displayed on the calender, the width may be too small to show multiple appointments for a single provider within the same time slot.

But I do agree that, at least, the system should provide a warning or not allow multiple appointments for a provider within the same time slot.   Some encounters are considered face to face and a provieder cannot be in two places at once.

Thanks
Alfonso

emrtech wrote on Tuesday, April 20, 2010:

A day after I posted my note of not seeing 2 appt’s in same slot, I did see both, BUT then the next day I had only one showing, so not sure.  Maybe need to widen the browser. 

billpet wrote on Tuesday, April 20, 2010:

I tried to test this on http://opensourceemr.com:2095/openemr/ . I only added 1 patient so I tried to schedule 2 appointments for the same time for that 1 patient. It seems to have totally killed the server for about 5 minutes. It’s back up now and shows the 2 appointments. Interesting

emrtech wrote on Tuesday, April 20, 2010:

I’m back again.  I think that on the duplicate time period that I may have entered one as Admin. and the other as a Physician.  The only reason I saw it correctly the next day is that before I logged out I probably changed it to the physician and then the next day it looked ok.  MY FAULT.