Back-to-Back Patients
In situations where you have back to back virtual patients, your virtual patients will not be auto-roomed, but should be manually roomed by you. This is to allow physicians the most flexibility with regards to when, where, and how they see virtual appointments and take breaks between virtual patients. Managing your back-to-back patient queue is important as it affects admin, who will call patients who fail to check in prior to their appointment, as well as patients, who are given a wait time based on your queue.
When seeing back to back virtual patients in–clinic, you should:
Drag your first virtual patient into the room you prefer, or advance them if you want CHIME to choose a room for you
When offsite, the patient will go into your own personal virtual room
Handle the appointment as you normally would (call/zoom with patient, chart, etc)
Advance the patient out of the room
Now, you’ll see a popup with two options. You can either:
Advance your next virtual patient into the room you are currently in or…
Not advance them. This may be your choice if you need some time to catch up on other tasks.
If you choose not to advance your next virtual patient to the current room, the room will go into a special status: “N/A - [Your name] is seeing virtual patients.”
When you’re ready to see the next patient, drag and drop them into the room, then continue to advance them as usual.
When offsite, you may also elect to click the advance button beside their name to have them enter your virtual room
You don’t need to change the room status back to available until you’re ready to leave. You can drag patients directly into the room you’re in, even while it’s in the “N/A - [Your name] is seeing virtual patients.” status.
Helpful Tips!
If you’re ahead of schedule and you’ve already spoken to a patient who has not yet checked in, remember to remove them from your queue. This will prevent admin from calling the patient again, and cut down on confusion as well as wasted admin resources.