For the past couple of days I’ve been hacking away on a popup window and some supporting logic for adding and editing calendar events. You can see a screenshot here:
The main thing I’m trying to do is simplify the process of adding appointments and other calendar items. For example now you can click on a time slot in the calendar and the event window pops up, then you can select a patient and fill in the other fields and click Save. All done - no hassle getting back to where you were in the calendar.
The other thing I’m doing is getting rid of a big chunk of nasty PostCalendar/Smarty code.
This is a pretty big change, so I’d like to get your comments and suggestions before I start checking in the new stuff. Thanks!
As usual, it looks good. One question: does the window say "on top" or is it just a pop up window, ie if you accidently click on the window under it, the popup window disappears leaving the popup window "orphaned"?
Also, with this change can one at least display the appointment type also, not just the patient. I think that would be an improvement over the current functionality, at least that way, one can see at a glance who and what type of appointment it is.
Browsers do not have general-purpose support for “modal” dialogs. There are some tricks you can apply towards making a popup stay on-top, but they don’t work completely. I’ll see what I can do (or do you have any suggestions?).
I’m not sure what you mean by “appointment type”. There is an event category which by default can be “office visit”, “new patient” or “established patient”. There are also customizable title and description fields. But all that was there before… can you be more specific as to what you’d like?
Could you be in one patient and enter and appt. on another Pt. ? ( ie. the clerk is entering a charge, the phone rings, another Pt. calls for appt., pull-up pop-up Pt. search window, found Pt., click Appt. Scheduler, match one with the other and presto Appt. given for that Pt. at that date and time, close pop-up window and go back to continuing entering the charge on the original Pt. ? )
TIA
I didn’t think there was a modal/always on top feature, but that shouldn’t be a problem without it since that’s how the search option works when in the demographics when looking up the subscriber.
I was talking about the event category, displaying that on the calendar with the name instead of just the name alone. There is more than enough room.
I came up with some JavaScript/DOM code for an always-on-top feature that mostly works. It’s not perfect but it’s a big improvement over doing nothing about it. This can be plugged into other popups also.
Regarding events as they appear in the calendar, the amount of information that can be presented comfortably will depend on how many columns of docs are listed. I guess what I’ll do is add an option for “long” and “short” event displays.
This would work except that you can’t get to the calendar without closing out the patient. But I could probably add the event editor popup to the “popups” list, which should take care of it.
OK the new code is tentatively done, and looks very good so far. We’ll give it a trial by fire tomorrow, and then I’ll apply any needed corrections and check it in.
At least the event title should show. That way, at a glance, one would know what was expected for each appointment, and the scheduling person would know not to schedule two physicals at the same time. As it stands now, one would either have to remember what was on the schedule or bring up the tip for each one.
Since we can add more categories I don’t think the description is necessary in the long version since we can bring up the tool tip still to see the description. I think it wouldn’t be much more overhead to add the event category/title. BTW, is the color option per category too much to try to implement? Not having looked into it myself I’m not sure what it entails.
