Customer Practice Location
Hi,
We are having some issues with Practice Location of Customers that have been seen at both of our clinics.
If they are added initially at one clinic, they forever remain at that Practice Location unless manually changed in their Customer Information tab.
This affects our invoices, Investigations (HL7), printing etc etc.
Would it be a major issue to change the archetype in party.customerperson so they didn't have a practice location? Does practice location affect other things if remove it from the customer?
If it does affect other things and I need to keep it, do I just need to make staff manually change the practice location when the patient is seen at different clinic? I presume this needs to be done before a new invoice is started as changing it after doesn't change the invoice location.
Thanks,
greta
Re: Customer Practice Location
Greta - in general the customer's practice location is used as a selection tool on reports. However, when reporting income etc, the location that is used is that recorded against the invoice etc.
We have a similar situation - functionally there are 3 practice locations, CC (the housecall business), EIAH (the street practice 8am to 8pm), and AEC (the after hours service, 8pm to 8am). We commonly have CC customers whose patients are treated at EIAH for surgery, and we commonly have EIAH and CC customers needing after hours services who are treated at AEC. If we want to know how much money the EIAH business is making, there are two two ways to look at this: 1) sales to EIAH customers irrespective of the location at which the work was done; or 2) sales with the location set to EIAH irrespective of customer's practice location.
You say "affects invoices" - can you expand on this? If we generate an invoice for a CC customer we will always put it on CC letterhead and the invoice shows no trace of where the work was done.
You say "affects Investigations (HL7)" - again can you expand on this? By the HL7 bit I suspect you mean the effect on Smart Flow and I am afraid that I know very little about this (but I am going to have to learn because Trilby wants to use it as soon as the charging enhancements are available in 2.0).
You say "affects reports" - yes it does as explained above. In fact we run more that 3 practice locations (because of default printer requirements) - for example there are 4 CC "sublocations", two for the two housecall vets in their cars, and two more, CC-Accounts and CC-Office. To handle this we use a tweaked version of the Practice Summary - Income by Location subreport which reports things by Business Location rather than practice location, and this is achieved by a line in the sql code which translates practice location to business as follows:
ifnull(if(el.name like 'Creature%','Creature Comforts',if(el.name like 'A%','Animal Emergency Centre','East Island Animal Hospital')),'--None--') as locationYou asked "Would it be a major issue to change the archetype in party.customerperson so they didn't have a practice location?". No - you could simply hide the practice node. All future customer will have no practice location set, and you would probably want to run an sql script to null out the practice location for all customers. However, you will lose the ability to select customers via their practice locations.
My recommedation: leave the customer's practice node as is, and address the problems it is causing you. If you can detail those, perhaps I can help.
Regards, Tim G
Re: Customer Practice Location
Hi Tim,
Thanks for the response. Below is my expanded explanations. As a brief overview, our second clinic is run purely on VPN (doesn't have it's own server).
Invoices: If a customer is added at location A, the practice location A is chosen and saved on that customer. From that point onwards, all invoices are connected to location A, unless you manually go into the customer and change the practice location to location B before checking them in. It doesn't matter that you've checked them in from the new location B schedule or into the new location B worklist, it uses the customer location from the location A.
Investigations: If the customer has location A linked to their file, and therefore the invoices are connected to location A, Investigations such as IDEXX inhouse pathology will send the request to the machine at location A. Doesn't matter that the patient is in the worklist of location B, or that specific clinician is connected to only location B, the set-up of where to send the investigation to is linked to the customer location A.
Printing: Again this is linked to the invoice. As the invoice is at location A, the drug labels are printing to location A even though the patient is in the worklist of location B. It can be changed manually, but it defaults to where the invoice is.
I will think about whether we train staff to change the practice location in the customer tab. I need to consider how often we share customers (chances staff are going to forget to change the location and therefore create havoc) vs reporting.
Maybe it's not possible, but seems all the issue would be fixed if the invoice was not dictated by the customer location. Is there a way it could be dictated by the worklist? Or schedule?
Or can the customer have a location, but this isn't pushed into the invoice? Invoices remain location free? or would that mean the investigations/printing wouldn't work? Maybe I'm going right off track here.....
Re: Customer Practice Location
Greta: your statement "invoices: If a customer is added at location A, the practice location A is chosen and saved on that customer. From that point onwards, all invoices are connected to location A" is not correct.
The location set for the invoice is that currently set for the user, it is totally separate to the practice location set for the customer.
Here are some invoices for a customer whose practice location is set to CC:
We use tweaked invoice, credit etc archetypes which pull the practice location and author into the description. Hence you can see invoices with locations EIAH, CC and CC Office.
Note that because of the "The location set for the invoice is that currently set for the user" functionality, we make it very very obvious what the user's current practice location is set to via the location's logo - eg for CC
for EIAH
We also set the default location for each user to the appropriate one - so Annie T who normally works nights has AEC set as her default location, whereas Nicole L who works days has hers set to EIAH.
The same applies for investigations: if the user's practice location is currently set to XXXX then this will be the location set against the investigation, irrespective of the customer's practice location.
Regards, Tim G
Re: Customer Practice Location
Given we will be in the same boat as Greta soon I watch this conversation with interest...
Re: Customer Practice Location
Hi Greta,
We run multiple practice locations.
All invoice line items are according to the practice location where the invoice was created (or checkedin) and this is the place listed under the location in the invoice, it does not relate to the practice location (which possibly should be termed preferred or primary location) which is in the client information section. A client have a preferred location of one entity (selected under the client page) but their invoice is listed under a different practice location; - which is what we see in reports / etc.
Printing / HL7 / etc can all be related to the Location currently selected and NOT the physical location of the person creating the invoice / drug label / pathology request / etc.
What you need to watch and ensure is correct is the location selection at the top R of the screen and ensure that this is correct when you checkin your patient.
Hope this helps.
David
AdelaideVet