Details: The Calendar
Appointment and event scheduler
GoalMinder has a comprehensive appointment scheduler. The scheduler shows daily lists of patients to be seen, month-at-a-glance schedules of practitioners, and appointment histories of every patient. It schedules events as well as appointments (billable hours) of clinicians. The scheduler has a joint meeting finder that identifies common open times among any number of therapists specified to facilitate the organization of meetings, co-therapy needs, etc. and it allows for predefined "holds" to be indicated and scheduled, such as holds for intakes, for emergency availability coverage, etc. Users can search across all therapists for the first available intake opening, for example.
Here is a Saturday in the day of Debra Goodtherapist. She had placed "special arrangement" holds on three hours of Saturday time, beginning at 9:00am, and she scheduled one of those hours with a client along with biofeedback equipment. Then she scheduled an hour out of the clinic to get a haircut. She did not use her first hold.
It keeps track of each therapist's schedule of availability and easily resets hours when vacations, therapist illness or other absences occur. Rooms and equipment can be scheduled as well as clients. GoalMinder can handle from 1 to 100 clinicians or more, depending on the capacity of the server and whether the client-server option of the program has been purchased. It even allows overlapping or double scheduling to handle specific situations such as a supervisor needing to check on several therapy sessions within the same general period. The appointment scheduler has been refined through two years use at the University of Wisconsin Dept. of Psychiatry, so we say with confidence that it can handle any small or large clinic's needs.
The calendar serves as the "hub" of the relational database as well as providing information in its own right. From calendar entries, the billing program knows for whom to set up posting sheets. The Treatment area know which clients need notes for a given day. In short, the calendar relates clients, therapists, and times, and every other part of the program needing this information has it -- instantly.
