I’d like to ask if someone can create a print button on the patient’s appointment creation lightbox. The purpose of this button is to print a patient reminder card of which the information is coming out from the EMR and not written by the front office person onto a clinic business card. Many times it had been a problem in our free clinic that a student will hand over to the patient their next appointment date on a business card and forgetting to add the appointment onto the EMR. The other possible cause is that the patient may be forging the date onto a business card that hey previously had (somehow) as it is very hard to get an appointment in our clinic because we are already fully booked until May (Saturday clinic).
It would be recommended to print out the patient reminder card printout on a pre-uploaded clinic form with the clinic logo, address, phone number and hours of operation.
Lastly, I’d recommend that the printout auto-create a unique hash number saved on the appointment in the EMR and printed on the Patient Appointment Printout. This will ensure that patients cannot forge a new appointment for themselves. If the appointment is modified in the EMR somehow, the old hash mark is kept and a new hash mark is appended to the old hash mark for historical purposes.
These types of customizations are generally not very tough to do. Three ways to go about this are:
1) If know how to code (or willing to learn), can do this yourself.
2) Request a volunteer(or professional to do for free) to do this (you have already done this with your post and can also post in the Feature Request tracker here). So can wait to see if get any response. I’m a volunteer, but do not have time to do code customizations.
3) Ask for a professional to do it: http://www.open-emr.org/wiki/index.php/OpenEMR_Professional_Support (I’d be happy to provide recs on pros who can do this in a manner that would also allow other users to enjoy this new feature: brady@sparmy.com).
Yes, forging…with the going rate on when they can be seen, and knowing that the clinic service is free, people “may” do what they need to do in order to get the immediate service they want.
Unfortunately, the clinic works on a tight donation budget that they will not be able to pay for software development. I’d like to learn it but it throws me out of the other managing and administration of OpenEMR that I am currently doing right now.
We just finished a customization that might apply here. It would need to be modified some, BUT what it does is call the Popup Letter Writing feature with a specific appt template, and allows you to print a letter/appt reminder, email it and save the PDF to the patient document tree…
We’d need to take some stuff out of the code that is very specific to the customer to make it work for the general case, but it’s doable