24.11. Patient Flow Setup

Patient Flow Overview

Patient Flow is a digital drug log that helps your clinic meet all state veterinary board requirements with ease. It calculates drug doses using your clinic’s protocols, supports documentation of exams, SOAP notes, surgical techniques, and medical notes, and enables exceptionally fast client communication.

In this section, we will review how to set up your drug protocols, pre-calculated drug charts, controlled substance bottle inventory, and Patient Flow automations.

The Patient Flow chapter gives an overview of how to use each function once set up.

Drug Charting

Drug Charts / Protocol Setup

Set up standard protocols for each species your clinic services. Non-standard protocols are useful for common variances your clinic may encounter such as aggressive or brachycephalic patients.

Learn how HERE.

Available Drugs Setup

Enable drugs your clinic use that do not need a standard chart pre-generated. This is best for uncommon uses.

Controlled Substance Draw Structure

Most clinics will use Centralized Controlled Substance draw structure. This creates one master drug log for the clinic. A De-Centralized draw structure is used for larger clinics that may operate teams. The drugs are divided up and assigned to teams. The drug bottle can only be used by the assigned team. A drug log is created for each team.

Controlled Substance Setup

Here you can set up and manage your controlled substance bottle inventory. Add new bottles to this section when your clinic receives them. Create new bottles of compounds as your clinic mixes them up in-house.

By clicking manage for any of the drugs, you can add new bottles, waste bottles in the system and see how a bottles history. Learn how HERE.

Settings

Here you can toggle to enable or disable these options depending on how your clinic runs.

• Does your clinic keep animals overnight as a routine part of spay/neuter surgeries?
• Does your clinic uses extended exam?
• Does your clinic want to see rechecks in Patient Flow?
• Does your clinic want to see Basic Wellness appointments in Patient Flow?
• Set exam defaults to "normal." If not enabled, the TPR, Subjective, and Objective will not be auto-selected to normal.

Note: If an animal is checked in and this setting was not enabled, changing it will not move them to Patient Flow. Updates to this section apply to appointments checked in after the update.

Automations

In Patient Flow, when an animal's services are completed, staff click the "Done" button. Here, you can enable automatic actions to occur when the animal is marked as done.

When Done is clicked it can do any combination of the following:

• Move animal to Checked Out status.
• Send take-home template to the owner via email or text.
• Send take-home paperwork to print.
• Send pickup text to public clients, allowing you to stagger pickups across your clinic day.

Note: You must have the Call & Text Addon set up to utilize texting functions. Learn how to set it up HERE.

NOTICE: The Drugs tab from Checkout was phased out in 2021 and replaced with Patient Flow. It is no longer supported by Clinic HQ.