The appointment book is aimed for front-desk staff. It allows to
make, edit and cancel appointments.
The doctors can view the appointment list too (who is in the waiting room?)
or give appointments without interfering with the receptionists. It can be
used as a time tracking tool, too as it allows to keep track of when a patient
Central unit of the appoinment book is the schedule widget - a spreadsheet
like GUI control. Within the appointment book framework, any number of schedules
can be displayed simultaneously (for example one for each doctor in a practice).
Date selection controls in the framework sterr all schedule widgets simultaneously
- taht allows to quickly page through the weeks to see which doctor could
still fit a patient in.
"Today" is marked yellow, weekend days pink, and days where a doctor is not available are marked in grey. Of course, all colours are configurable.
Data entry is simple & efficient: after selecting a vacant time slot
, one starts typing a few characters of a surname; if there might be many
patients with the same surname, one can enter a few characters of a given
name too, separated by a space. If the appointment should be longer than
standard, keying in a '+' for each pre-defined increment will do the trick.
On Enter, a small dialogue pops up and takes obver the cursor. It displays
all matches from the patient data base (matching surname fraction and optionally
given name fraction), the cursor is already positioned on the first entry.
Enter confirms, cursor keys move the selection, Alt-n allows to enter a new
patient. Thus, in the most common cse the appointment is made with 5-6 keystrokes
: 2 first characters of the surname, 2 first characters of the given name,
Enter.