Referring doctors, specialists, insurers and suppliers aren't patients, but you write to them, bill them and report on them. Contacts is where they live.
What contacts are
Contacts are people and organizations you deal with who aren't patients: the Doctors who refer to you, specialists you write to, a health fund, a supplier. They're kept on the Contacts page, per location, separate from the patient list, so a doctor never ends up with a patient record and a doctor who is also a patient has both.
Long lists are paged: the foot of the list reads Showing 1–20 of 1,532 with numbered pages, … for gaps and previous and next arrows; on a phone it shows 3 / 12 between the arrows. While the list reloads after a page, location or filter change, the rows fade until the new page appears.
Add a contact
Choose the Contact type
Standard, Doctor, 3rd Party Payer, Supplier or Customer. Only contacts of type Doctor are offered as a patient's Referring doctor, so choose it for every doctor and specialist.
Personal information
Title, First name, Last name, Preferred name, Occupation and Company name. For an organization, put the organization in Company name and the person you deal with in the name fields.
Contact information and Address
Email, phone numbers, and the full address. The address is what prints on a letter addressed to this contact.
Notes, then save
Anything staff should know, such as which days the practice is open.
Adding, editing and archiving contacts needs the contact-management permission, which Receptionists and Administrators have; Practitioners can look contacts up but not change them.
Where contacts are used
- As a patient's Referring doctor on their Details, so a report can list referrals by doctor and a letter back to the referrer can be addressed in one step.
- As the recipient of a letter written from a patient's record, with their name and address filled in.