Overview of Variable Recall Default Values

Recall Manager historically had a single default appointment service, length and recall interval for each recall type, and this was applied to all New patients. For example an Examination service set at 20 minutes would apply to all patients, even though this appointment length may be more suited to an adult than a child. With this configuration, where a different recall was required, Providers would manually customise the default recall appointment length when they created the recall.

From EXACT v12.2 the recall defaults can be flexibly overridden so that the appointment service, length and recall interval vary depending on patient Age, Payor, and Provider.

For example an EX20 examination service default length of 20 minutes can be overridden as

• 10 minutes for patients under 18 years of age
• 25 minutes for Provider A
• 30 minutes for Provider B

The mechanism to enable this flexibility in v12.2 and later is the Override Patient Group:

The settings in these Groups take priority over the standard default recall settings.

Define as many Override Patient Groups as required.

Each group must be a unique combination of Age, Payor and Provider (and, in Australia, Healthfund).

NOTE: A combination of the ALL groups is not allowed because this is already covered by the default values set for the recall type: All (Ages), All (Payors), and All (Providers) - if you try to set this combination you will see an error message:

For patients who are configured to use the default settings...

For each group, specify the values that will override the system defaults: recall Service, appointment Length and recall Interval.
Order the groups carefully by means of the Up/Down arrows because EXACT identifies only the first group that a patient matches, working from the top of the list to the bottom.

EXACT then assigns to the patient the override Service, appointment Length and recall Interval as defined for that first applicable group.

Benefits

• Flexible recall settings.
• Greater automation.

  For example, recall settings can now automatically change when patient parameters change, such as when patients turn 18 or when they are assigned to a different Provider.

• It is possible to change patient recall values by changing group membership configuration - by means of the Overrides your practice can easily update an entire group of patients to a new recall setting - for example if the practice policy changes a standard 30 minute recall slot to a 20 minute slot.
• Choose any service as the recall default, even if the service has been elsewhere set up with no defined length.
• Multiple Providers can book the same recall service but with appointment lengths customised for each Provider.

  NOTE: Variable appointment lengths don't apply if co-duties are set as On (in Configure > Appointment Book...), in which case the appointment length will be fixed to the service length and shape, as before the v12.2 upgrade.

• The recall services are now primarily configured in the recall configuration rather than in the services setup (see Configuring Variable Recall Defaults)