Eye Care Appointment Scheduler

Summary

The Eye Care Appointment Scheduling Profile specifies the creation of a scheduling information exchange between a master appointment schedule and a working healthcare provider recognizing that often the master schedule and the personnel who operate it may not be readily available at the provider’s location. It also defines the communication between patient registration systems and the appointment scheduling system about patient demographics. The Eye Care Appointment Request contains all of the required data needed to request a patient appointment. The Eye Care Appointment Response has all of the required data to confirm that an appointment with the desired criteria has been created or that the appointment could not be set as requested.

Benefits

The benefits include standardizing the means of requesting patient 150 appointments, minimizing the time needed for these requests, maintaining both the flexibility and the specificity needed for appointment scheduling in a clinical environment while increasing the accuracy of both the request and the response, and giving the healthcare provider a means to determine if the scheduling request has or has not been filled. Additionally the Scheduling Profile allows the healthcare provider to view schedules based on requested criteria.

Details

The problem domain of appointment scheduling is broad and detailed with many variations and many solutions. Eye Care Appointment Scheduling addresses the specific problem of a provider making appointment requests to a scheduler. In many clinics this is done through notations in a chart, through phone calls or direct communication with a scheduling person and even through the use of sticky notes. Eye Care Appointment Scheduling does not currently presume to instruct a clinic or provider on how scheduling should be done. It does, however, provide the means to communicate with as much detail as needed the wishes of a provider in a clinical context so that an appropriate appointment can be made and provides for information to be sent back to the provider so that the provider can know, if he or she wants to know, how that appointment schedule request was filled. Of particular importance in the context of Appointment Scheduling is that eye care differentiates between appointment requests and orders that result in a modality worklist in other parts of the IHE Technical Framework.