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Welcome to PatientTracker! PatientTracker is a simple yet powerful new way to organize workflow in your office or clinic. We’ve taken care to make the application as easy to use as possible, so most of its features should be intuitive. However, this documentation details exactly how each feature works, and it should be able to help with any questions you may have. Contents Overview Quick How-Tos Installing and Running PatientTracker First-Run Wizard Configuration Options Patients Pages Messages Network Information Overview PatientTracker was born out of the reality that managing workflow in many small clinics was difficult and clumsy. Typically, clinics needed to know when and where patients were waiting, how long they had been there (so as to prioritize assistance to them), and which professionals were needed where. We also realized that professionals don’t have a lot of time to figure out complex programs, so our application would need to be simple to use and understand. The maximum amount of pertinent information for the minimum of expended effort was our goal. The PatientTracker user interface is comprised of three main sections: the Waiting Area, the Operatories, and the Avatar Store. Let’s look at each of these one at a time. The Waiting Area represents the physical area of your clinic where patients wait to be seen by a professional. Each patient is represented by a progress bar, which indicates how long she has been waiting. Optionally, each patient can be associated to a health care professional (or, HCP) designated as a first assistant. In clinics where different HCPs need to take care of different people in the Waiting Area, this allows each HCP to see when someone is there for him. The Waiting Area can show an unlimited number of patients, but the ones who have been waiting the longest are always sorted to the top of the list. This makes it easy to see who most urgently needs assistance. The Operatories section represents each of the physical rooms in your clinic where action takes place. For example, you may have an X-Ray operatory, a Surgery operatory, and a Hygiene operatory. After leaving the waiting room, at any given time, the patient is in one of your operatories until she is discharged for the day. During the course of care, sometimes a patient must be handed off to a different HCP. Or, in other cases, the assistance of two or more HCPs may be necessary to perform a certain task. Finally, sometimes a service is needed that can be performed by one of many HCPs. An example of such a service is anesthesia. Just as all the action in the real world happens in your operatories, all the action in PatientTracker happens in the Operatories section. Each one is named to correspond to a real operatory, and each one can contain a patient and multiple pages for HCPs or services. The patient is represented as before by a progress bar showing minutes and seconds of waiting. However, unlike in the waiting room, the progress bar does not run unless there is at least one outstanding page to the patient’s operatory. For example, if Patrick Patient is in X-Ray and is currently being assisted by Alice Assistant, he is not waiting, so there is no need to have a clock running. On the other hand, if Alice realizes that she needs the help of Debra Dentist before she can proceed, she can page Debra to X-Ray. Now that there is an outstanding page, the patient timer will begin to run until the page is responded to. Pages for services that are not bound to a specific HCP can be created in the same way. Such a service is anesthesia. Each page has a priority associated to it. By default, the highest priority is given to the oldest page. For example, if Debra Dentist is paged to three different operatories, the pages will have priorities of 1, 2, and 3, the oldest page having the highest priority. After Debra responds to the first page, the remaining pages will automatically re-order themselves. It is also possible to manually specify one page as being the most or least important, regardless of how old it is. You can find more details on this in the Pages section. The main purpose of the Operatories section is to represent the current state of your real-world clinic. It shows where your patients are, how long they have been waiting, where HCPs and services are needed, and where they are needed the most. The Avatar Store is divided into two sections, Health Care Professionals and Services. An avatar is like an icon; it is a means of representing a person in the computer world that is our application. Each person is assigned an avatar during configuration. For example, Debra Dentist might be a frog, Alice Assistant might be a sunflower, and Harriett Hygienist might be a girl with sunglasses. An advantage to using avatars to represent people is that each person can pick an avatar that represents her personality somehow. This makes it easy to identify oneself in what might otherwise be an abstract world. The Health Care Professionals section of the Avatar Store serves a dual purpose. First, it shows each of the available HCPs and allows them to be paged. Secondly, it shows who has received messages and allows such people to read them. For details about each of these, please see the Pages and Messages section, respectively. The bottommost section of the application is the Services section of the Avatar Store. Services can be paged to any operatory, but they cannot receive messages, since they are not bound to any specific HCP. You create pages for services in exactly the same manner as for HCPs. The next section will look at installation of PatientTracker. If you’ve already installed, the next logical section to read will be First-Run Wizard Quick How-Tos Quick answers to the most frequently asked questions. How do I... Create a new patient? Choose File > New Patient... from the main menu, or right-click an open area of the Waiting Area and choose Add New Patient... from the context menu. Move a patient? Drag the patient from the Waiting Area to an operatory or between Operatories. Change patient details? Right-click the patient and choose Details... from the context menu. Remove a patient? Right-click the patient and choose either Remove or Finished from the context menu. Page an HCP or service? Drag the HCP or service from the Avatar Store (below the Operatories) to the appropriate operatory. Cancel a page? Right-click the page and choose Cancel Page from the context menu, or simply double-click the page. View messages? To view abbreviated messages, simply pause with the cursor over the HCP whose messages you would like to see in the Avatar Store. Create/modify/delete messages? Access the Messages dialog by right-clicking an Avatar Store HCP and choosing Messages... or by choosing the HCP’s name from Tools > Messages in the main menu. To modify or delete a message, select it by clicking once in the list of existing messages, and then either press Delete or modify the message particulars and press Modify. Perform a root canal with only a ball-point pen and a rubber band? Sorry, we can’t help you there. Installing and Running PatientTracker Installation of both the server and client portions of PatientTracker is simple. First, let’s define exactly what the server and client are, and how they differ. The server is the software that runs the show, so to speak. It maintains the big picture of what is happening throughout the clinic. It receives requests from the clients and decides how to handle things. When a new page is created by one of the clients, for example, the server broadcasts that information to all of the clients so that they will all be aware of it. Each client is unaware of what happens on other clients until the server notifies them. Therefore, the server is like the foreman of the operation. There are no special hardware requirements for the server. It can run on exactly the same type of machine as the clients. Simple install via the supplied installer package, run the application, and press the Start Server link to start the application on your network. Note: The server must be running in order for the clients to communicate. If you ever receive a message on the client saying “Server failed to respond," it most likely means that the server is not running, either because someone stopped it or because the machine was turned off. Note: During installation, an shortcut icon will be created and placed on the desktop. If you would like PatientTracker Server to start automatically whenever the machine is turned on, place this icon (or a copy of it) in the Startup folder of your Programs directory. This is an easy way to make sure that your server software will always be running. The client is the software that displays the data from the server in an attractive format. Your office will have one machine running PatientTracker server, but many machines running the client. To install the client, simply run the supplied installer package. Each time you launch the client, it will try to establish a communication link with the server. If it cannot, it will not allow you to continue, because without the server acting as the main information hub, the client is useless. After the client finds the server on the network, all communication will happen automatically and seamlessly. First-Run Wizard The very first time you launch the PatientTracker client and it successfully establishes communication with the server, it will open a wizard to help you configure your application to your specific needs. After you have configured the application the way you like it, the wizard will no longer appear automatically on startup, but you can access it at any time by choosing Tools > Options... from the main menu. Let’s take a look at the configuration options and what each one means. Configuration Options There are a total of five pages of configuration options. They are: Admin Password Operatories Operatory Layout Health Care Professionals Other Settings Admin Password In some offices, it may be desirable for only one or a few people to be able to change configuration settings. If so, you can create a password to lock others out of the options wizard. Or, you can leave this password blank to allow anyone to access the wizard. Strictly speaking, PatientTracker was not designed as a high-security application. The admin password is stored in a human-readable form on the server, so if you lose your password, you can retrieve it there. How to retrieve a lost admin password
This section allows you to configure the operatories that are represented in the PatientTracker application. Adding an operatory is a simple matter of typing in a name and pressing the Add button. To delete an operatory, select it from the Existing Operatories list and press the Delete button. You may want the operatories to be ordered in a specific way so that their order in the application corresponds more closely to the actual layout of your office. You can configure the operatory display order by selecting operatories and using the Move Up and Move Down buttons to adjust their position. Operatory Layout This is where you decide how many operatories you want to show and how you would like them arranged. You can choose tall and slender looks, such as the 2 columns by 5 rows layout, or short and wide looks, such as the 4 columns by 2 rows layout. Altogether, there are a total of 12 different layouts, which will accommodate up to 20 operatories. Note: Keep in mind that no matter how many operatories you actually use, PatientTracker will allot a fixed amount of space for them, determined by your layout. So, for example, if you are using the 2x2 layout, there is space for four operatories. If you have set up more than four, only the first four will be shown. Note: To preserve uniformity of interface, all clients use the same layout. This allows HCPs to look at a client in any room and always see the same layout. However, it is important to realize that not all clients have the same screen resolution, and that some of the layouts might not fit on certain clients. For example, the 2 columns by 5 rows layout is over 700 pixels tall. If any of your clients are using very tight screen resolutions (such as 640x480), they won’t be able to display the entire application. Therefore, if your office uses monitors set to very small resolutions, try using the shorter and wider layouts. Note: If you make a layout change while other copies of the client are running, they will not change until the next time they are restarted. Health Care Professionals This is the page that allows you to create the avatars for the people in your organization whom you wish to represent in PatientTracker. To add a new HCP, type in a name and a short name. The short name must be four characters or less and is used when there is not enough space to use the full name. Its purpose is to provide a hint or reminder as to the identity of the avatar. After you’ve chosen names, press the Choose Avatar... button. The dialog box that appears helps you to choose an avatar for your HCP. Avatars already in use are grayed slightly. When you click each avatar, you’ll hear the associated sound. This sound is played when the HCP receives a page or a message. Choose an avatar and sound combination that you feel represents the HCP in question and press the Use Avatar button to create the HCP. Existing HCPs appear in the larger list box. You can delete mistakes or HCPs that are no longer with your office by selecting their names and pressing the Delete button. Or you can change the avatar by selecting an HCP and pressing the Change Avatar... button to access the avatar chooser from before. Other Settings Progress Bar Total Time This setting configures how fast the patient progress bar fills up. For example, if you have this value set to 5 minutes, then the progress bar will appear to fill up very fast, whereas if it is set to 60 minutes, it will take an entire hour before it fills up. Automatic Paging This option specifies whether or not to page the first assistant automatically when moving a patient out of the Waiting Area. To understand this feature, let’s imagine how things work at two different clinics. At clinic A, the person who leads the patient from the Waiting Area into the first operatory is not the person who will actually assist him there. Consequently, the first assistant needs to be paged to know when his patient is ready for him. This clinic would use automatic paging. When the patient is moved into the first operatory, if there is an HCP designated as the first assistant, he is automatically paged to that operatory. In clinic B, things work a bit differently. Here, the person who will first be assisting the patient is the one who retrieves her from the Waiting Room. In this scenario, such assistants need to know that they are needed as soon as a patient appears in the Waiting Area. This clinic would keep automatic paging turned off. When the patient is moved into the first operatory, there is no automatic page because the person assisting her is already there. Instead, when a new patient is created and a first assistant is designated, the sound alert for that assistant is played to let her know that there is a patient in the Waiting Area ready for assistance. Automatic Data Reset You may want PatientTracker to clear out patient, page, and message information each day at a specified time. For example, if you leave at 5:00 one evening and there are still unresolved pages, and messages, your office may find it convenient to have PatientTracker wipe out such data each morning at 8:00 AM. If you never want PatientTracker to reset data automatically, you can check appropriate box. This is the safest way to maintain control over your data. Audio Alerts Normally, audio alerts are sounded when a new page is created or when an HCP receives a message. The audio alert is always the alert for the HCP directly affected by the event. For example, if Derrick Dentist receives a message, his audio alert will sound. You can choose not to have any audio alerts by checking the box in this section with the text "Do not play any audio alerts". Or, by clicking the box with the text "Use master audio alert for all events", you can have a single, generic sound occur whenever any event happens. Patients Now that we’ve had a good overview of how the application works and how it can be configured, we can look at the specifics of dealing with patients, pages, and messages. Patients are easy to understand. They represent a real patient in your clinic who needs assistance. There are two ways to create a patient. You can choose File > New Patient... from the main menu, or you can right-click in an open section of the Waiting Area and choose Add New Patient... from the context menu. The dialog box that appears allows you to specify a name, first assistant, and procedure description, but these fields are all optional. If you do not give a patient a name, PatientTracker will name it automatically with names like “New Patient 1," “New Patient 2," and so on. Important note: In order to comply with local and federal regulations, it may be necessary to avoid using last names for patients. We recommend first names only, or first names and last initials. Please discuss this in your office and agree on a standard procedure. If you give your patient a procedure description, it will appear in hover text when the cursor pauses over the patient. Once a patient is created, you can modify her details at any time by right-clicking the progress bar and choosing “Details..."from the context menu. You can do this throughout the life of the patient, in both the Waiting Area and the Operatories. To move a patient from the Waiting Room or between Operatories, simply drag it to a new location. When the patient is ready to leave your clinic, you can remove her from the application by right-clicking and choosing Remove (if still in the Waiting Area) or Finished (if in the Operatories) from the context menu. Pages One of the main purposes of PatientTracker is to show where HCPs and services are needed. Pages are the means to accomplish this. To page an HCP or service, simply drag the appropriate avatar from the Avatar Store to any operatory. The new page will receive a priority automatically. If you want to manually move a page to the top or bottom priority, you can right-click it and choose Prioritize Top or Prioritize Bottom from the context menu. For example, imagine that Derrick Dentist is paged to two operatories. When a third page is created, it will have a priority of three, the lowest, because it is the newest page. But let us imagine that this particular page is for a patient who needs help more urgently than the others. The user could use the Prioritize Top function to manually move this page to the top spot. When an HCP responds to a page, he can clear the page from PatientTracker in one of two ways. He can right-click the page and choose Cancel Page from the context-menu, or he can simply double-click the page. When a page is canceled, any outstanding pages for the same HCP automatically readjust their priorities. Messages A nice feature of PatientTracker is that it can be used as a memo system to relay brief messages to the HCPs who are a part of it. These can be phone/fax messages, or intra-office messages. For example, say that Debra Dentist receives a phone call at the front desk while she is helping a patient. Instead of writing a paper memo and hoping it doesn’t get lost, the receptionist can create a message in the PatientTracker application, which will sound an alert to let Debra know about it. PatientTracker can manage the messages for all the HCPs in your organization. There are two ways to add a message for a given HCP. You can right-click the HCP’s avatar in the Avatar Store and choose Messages... from the context menu, or you can choose Tools > Messages > (HCP name) from the main menu. The Messages dialog always appears in the context of a particular HCP. For example, when you launch the Messages box for Debra Dentist, you are seeing all messages for Debra. Note: Anyone can access this screen, so – like ordinary paper memos – don’t include items of a very personal nature. To add a new message, simply choose a message type (ex: telephone) and your name as the sender, type the message, and press Add. Your message is added to the upper list and an audio alert plays to let the recipient know she has received a message. Messages are often longer than can be displayed in the short list. To view the entire message, select it in the list box. The message will appear with full details in the lower editing section. You can now modify or delete the message as well. The number of messages each HCP has is reflected by the green number notched out in the upper right corner of her avatar in the Avatar Store. If you pause with the cursor over avatars that show messages, a tool tip displaying an abbreviated version of the messages will appear. It this way, HCPs can quickly access their messages without having to open a dialog box. To clear all messages, right-click the appropriate avatar in the Avatar Store and choose Clear Messages from the context menu. Network Information This section is not expected to be necessary for the vast majority of users. If you are a network administrator or if you are experiencing network problems with PatientTracker, read on. PatientTracker uses both the TCP and UDP communication protocols. UDP is used to broadcast data to all clients, and TCP is used for client-specific client-server communication. PatientTracker ships configured to use two ports well out of the range of the well-known port numbers, and it is very unlikely that these should ever conflict with other applications you have running internally. If it does, however, you can configure PatientTracker to use different ports. Also, if your clients and server must communicate through a firewall, you will need to set the firewall to allow traffic on the two ports. To view or change port configuration on the server, do the following:
Each client has a similar configuration file (located in the same directory as the executable), but it only specifies one thing: the UDP port on which to listen for server broadcasts. This number must be the same as the UDP port number specified in the server-side config file, so if you change it on the server, you must change it on each of the clients. If you change the port on which the server listens for TCP requests, no change is required on the clients. The reason for this is that the server broadcasts which TCP port it is listening on, so the clients always know how to contact the server. Conclusion Thank you for using PatientTracker. One of our primary goals was to make PatientTracker work perfectly and effortlessly, as if by magic. If you have encountered problems, we would like to know about them in order to make improvements. Please do not hesitate to contact us via our web site if you have suggestions. |
