Patient Visits
Below is the patient visits entry form. You will have many patients, and each patient may have multiple visit records. The software stores each of your patients visit records, so that you can easily find previous visit information. This entry form will be your primary workspace. You can create multiple patient records for any pet owner - simply add a new patient (or duplicate an existing clients' information) and enter the pets' name, date of birth, species, etc.
In the image below, in the patients area of the form, a button labled "Unpaid Invoices" will appear for patients who have an outstanding balance on one or more invoices. Clicking on this button will show you a list of invoices for this patient that have an outstanding balance.
The top portion of the patient visits entry form contains data entry areas for the patient name, pet name, address, phone numbers, species and breed, etc. The bottom portion of the entry form contains individual visit records for the patient displayed above.
The individual fields in the Patients area are pretty self-explanatory, except for the Tag# and Expires fields. These two fields are related to the current Rabies Certificate for the patient, and will be automatically filled in when you enter data in the Vaccinations entry form. You cannot change these fields directly. Additionally, the T.I.N. number is a Tax Identification Number, useful only if your clients require such a number on their invoices.
The Duplicate Client button is useful if a client acquires a new pet. This function also gives you the option to duplicate the patient (pet) information, as well as visit records. These optional functions are useful when a client has a litter of kittens or puppies.
When your database contains many patients, one of the buttons you will use frequently is the "Find Patient" button. (you can also bring up the Find dialog by pressing Alt-ef) When you first click on the "Find Patient" button, you should change the properties to look like the image below:
When you have the Find dialog filled in as shown above, the entire patients table will be searched, and the match will not need to be exact (you will need to have the cursor in one of the fields of the Patients area). This is very useful and powerful, and the settings that you have set up for the Find dialog will stay in place until you close the database. Each time you close and re-open the database, you will want to set up the Find dialog as shown above.
The Find by Date button will open a dialog box where you can input a date. When this button is clicked, the records displayed in the patient visits form will be limited to records that have a visit record for the date you entered. Also, the Find by Date button will now say "Reset Records", as shown below. When you click on the "Reset Records" button, all of the records will be available for display again.
The record navigation buttons, move you to the first, previous, next and last records in the patients area as well as the visits area. Thus, when you find the patient you are interested in, the record navigation next record button (in the visits area) will cycle you through existing visits for the patient displayed in the patients area above.
