Having spent the morning showing the practice manager over her soon to be installed system, and mindful of the recent exchanges about the ease of use of the system, I offer these suggestions for improving the usability of the system:

1. change the label on the Find button to Refresh/Find
    
2. have the system do a Find (ie refresh) whenever you change to a different workspace. Currently if the last time you looked at the Workflow|Scheduling screen was 30 minutes ago (because you have been hard at work entering consult data) then when you switch back to the scheduling screen it is as you left it. Note that this suggestion is not about 'as you stare at the scheduling screen it should update automatically every x seconds', it is about 'as you switch a different workspace it should refresh automatically'.  Note that without this people have to press Find as the first action whenever they switch to a new workspace.
    
3. remove the Add Visit and Note button from the Medical Records screen - or adjust it so that if there is a current open visit - ie a consult is running, then it just adds a note and not a visit as well. [I suspect that the Add Visit & Note facility is a hangover from before there was the nice visit editor that we currently have.]
    
4. add a Consult button to the Patients|Info and Patients|Medical Records screen that is displayed whenever there is a current consult running.  At the current time, you have to go back to the Workflow|Scheduling or Work List screens to get back into the visit editor - you can't get into the visit editor from the Medical Records screen.  You can Check-In from the Patient|Info screen, but you cannot Consult from there. [Perhaps we should also have a Check-In button on the Meddical record screen.]
    
5. if the Problems facility is seen as useful (ie the ability to put notes and medication under a problem heading) then a) it needs status selection (done in 1.7); b) on the summary screen, the notes and medication that are part of the problem need to be grouped under the problem [but maybe not - see below]; and c) we need to solve the problem that medication items don't get charged - ie if you put a medication item under the problem, then you have to remember to invoice it separately - BUT if you do this the medication will get duplicated.
   I can see (and bear in mind that I am not a vet) that it is useful to group things together under the one problem, and let this span multiple visits, and the Problems tab allows you to see the notes and medication related to that problem. However, I suspect one really needs to be able to add anything under the problem, ie invoice items, investigations, etc. A problem then becomes a tag which is optionally added to anything in the medical records - ie you go to the Problems tab and either select an existing unresolved problem, or create a new one - then anything you do to add items to the visit become part of the work for that problem.
   On the summary screen all you can see is that there is a problem - there is no feedback about what was done in relationship to that problem. However, if you go to the Problems tab, there you can see everything associated with that problem, notes, medication (which will be charged since it went in as an invoice item), images, investigations, anything)

The above suggestions (except for the Problems one) are aimed at improving the usability of the system and reducing the 'you have to go there before you can do that'  requirements. [I suspect that this contributes to the 'You talk to staff and newcomers to the system and they do not find it user friendly and complain that it is very "clicky"' remark by EastsideVetEmerg.

Regards, Tim G