A 'visit' is what it sounds like - a meeting between the vet and the patient. The visit entry in the medical records acts as a heading to group together all the items associated with the visit.  Thus under a visit one can have notes, documents, problems, medication and charged items.

The Medical Records Summary is displayed in visit order with the latest visit at the top. Within the visit itself, the items can be displayed in either ascending or descending date/time order.

There is no concept of 'finalising' a visit so that it cannot have entries added to it, or the existing entries deleted or edited. However, you cannot delete or add charges to a past visit.

The visit is normally created when you check-in the patient - but see also below. You then use the visit editor to add items to the visit. See also Schedules, Work Lists and Workflow.

The 'visit' will normally be a real vet-to-pet meeting, but could also be a phone call to the owner (and thus on the Medical Records screen there is an 'Add Visit & Note' button to allow this call to be easily recorded).

Visit Creation

Visits are created in the patient's medical record:

• as part of the appointment Check-In process
• if you create a task on the Work Flow|Work Lists screen, and then use the Consult button to open the Visit Editor
• if you use Customers|Payments to create or edit an invoice and the line item specifies the patient (and if the invoice involves multiple patients, then a visit will be generated for each one)
• if you use the 'Add Visit & Note' button on the medical records screen
• if you use the New button on the medical records screen to add a new visit

In the first three cases, and existing visit may be added to rather than creating a new one.  This occurs in the following circumstances (note that 'event date' means the appointment or task date or the date of the invoice line item):

• if an IN_PROGRESS visit exists and it is less than a week old, it will be added to
• If a COMPLETED visit exists starting on the same date as the event, it will be added to
• If a COMPLETED visit exists with both the start and and end dates set, and the event date is between visit start and end dates, it will be added to
• If a COMPLETED visit exists starting on a prior day but has no end date set, then it won't be used and a new visit will be created

Notes:

1. If the visit is being created as a result of checking-in an appointment, then the visit reason will be set to the appointment reason, otherwise the reason will not be set and the medical records will show 'No Reason'.
2. When a visit is completed as a result of the check-out process, the end date of the visit is not set automatically. The end date will be set if you edit the visit record manually and either change the visit status from In-Progress to Completed or set the Completed Date.