Multisegment Appointments Overview

At its most fundamental, an appointment consists of (a) a resource, (b) a patient, (c) an agreed up time and date to come together. In the real world, however, patients often see multiple resources for the same case. In some instances, these need to be tracked separately (e.g., visits to a physician versus those to a physical therapist) in that you need to know from a business workflow how many times a patient is authorized to see a physical therapist, for example. Alternatively, you may want to track how much business a physical therapist is doing each month. So it is important to treat each appointment separately.

In other instances, however, it makes more sense to track some appointments as part of a larger unit (e.g., a therapist-equipment or physician-room combination). For example, you may need to schedule a room, but you do not want it to artificially inflate your visit count or count toward a patient's authorized visits. Creating multisegment (or multiresource) appointments is one method that WellSky Resource Manager uses to help manage schedules for these situations.

Multisegment appointments are single appointments that are composed of more than one resource or of discontinuous times for the same resource. The time scheduled for each resource equals one segment of the whole appointment, and all the segments combine to form a single appointment.

Key Considerations

If your organization schedules multisegment appointments and you work with domains, keep in mind that users generally must have the same rights in all the domains in which the appointment occurs in order to manage the entire appointment.

If, for example, a patient is scheduled for multisegment appointment in Domain A and Domain B, but you only have rights in Domain A, you will not be able to perform most edit actions. You can, however,

Set the Treatment Time for the segment in domains to which you have access.
Select the patient

Similar concerns must be addressed with regard to users managing patients assigned to multiple domains: Unless you have rights to all the domains to which a case belongs, you cannot edit the case. As long as the case belongs to one of your domains, you can, however, schedule it.