There are multiple ways to set up patients in TotalMD, depending upon your preferred workflow, are in the program, and how your practice decides to setup patients. Here is a YouTube video link and instructions are below.
Getting Started – Creating Patients from the Scheduler
The easiest way to create a patient is to create them as you are placing them on the schedule for two reasons:
- They can be completed in a “temporary” status. That way if a new patient doesn’t actually show up for the appointment, you do not have a patient in your system that does not need to be there.
- Once you have “temporarily” created the patient, you can immediately place them on the schedule.
The first step is to double-click on the calendar in the spot that you wish to make the appointment. That will bring you to this screen:
You will then enter any information that needs to be there. If there are required or suggested fields, they will be highlighted red or yellow. The system will not allow you to save a patient without the red fields completed.
After the fields are filled, you will click Save Changes and the appointment will appear on the schedule, however, the patient will not be given a patient code at this time.
In order to create the patient in the system, right click on the appointment and you will get a pop-up message:
After you click the option to create the patient file, you will get the Patient Information Screen:
At this time, the necessary demographics to bill a claim will need to be entered. After entering the street address, there is a check mark that can be clicked to validate the address. Doing this can prevent some delays sending claims.
At the time the pop-up appears, the decision will need to be made as to whether to accept the address given or to keep the address that was entered. Also, when entering an address, the cursor skips from the street address to the ZIP code automatically. This will allow the system to build a database of ZIP codes that will automatically populate city and state for the user after the first entry.
Within TotalMD, you can group patients together for billing purposes. This allows for a statement to be sent to the Head of Household so that minor children are not receiving correspondence. In this screen you will see that a family member was added to George’s profile. He is responsible for his daughter Sandy’s bills:
This is what the dependent’s screen looks like:
The second tab is insurance information. Any and all insurance should be added here.
The Medical Alert tab will allow you to choose from standard allergies and immunity issues. Once a patient has had the information entered, medications will show in this screen as well.
The Extra Info tab will allow for any number of extra types of information to be added as well as a view of any associated tasks for this patient that have been created with Task Manager.
The Patient Vitals tab will show a running history of vitals for this patient.
If your package includes EHR, you will also see the Encounter Summary tab, which will show a running summary of patient encounters.
The Family History tab will show a list of familial problems. According to this George’s daughter had congestive heart failure as a child.
If you were to highlight George’s record itself, you would see that he has Primary Hypertension:
Once you have filled in all information necessary to the tabs, click Save Changes.
The second way to create a patient is to go to Patents>New Patient:
You will then see the same series of screens that you saw when creating the patient from the scheduler screen. Again, the advantage to creating within the scheduler is that if you have a perspective patient that is a no-show, there will be not be records of these people. If you create from the second method, you may end up with people who never really became patients.
One other note – when clicking on the patient record from various places within the program, you will see this red cross:
When the red cross is present, that means there are some sort of alert(s). By clicking on the cross, the alerts will pop up for you.
If you have questions regarding this functionality of TotalMD, please contact our support or training departments at 800-613-7597 Option 2 for Support or Option 3 for Training. If you would like a printable copy of this article, please contact Training at Option 3.