General Informaton About the Patients Tab

The Patients tab is your home for all patient-related activity, from keeping track of patient contact information, to related billing, activities, and appointment data.

The same buttons are available at the top of each screen within the Patients tab. Two square buttons to the right of the Calendar tab represent View as Form and View as List, respectively. Clicking on these buttons from a given layout in the program will take you to a patient-specific screen or a more general list of all the patients in the database

The Edit Patient button allows one to edit data on the patient information screen. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) requires that billing and practice management software have controls over who can use and view health-related data, as well as auditing what changes have been made to the data and by whom. AcuBase does this in the Patients section by requiring users to click on this “Edit” button, which allows access to edit fields, but also writes changes to a log file that can be reviewed at any time. While it may seem annoying to be required to click on a button in order to enter data here, it is a way to keep a log of information that is edited in this section of the program. Once editing is completed, clicking “Continue” will allow you to return to viewing other screens, and will write to the log file in the background.

The New Invoice button creates a new invoice for the current patient, based upon pre-set preferences created in both the Settings preferences and the Case Details section for the specific patient. New invoices may be created from any part of a patient’s record.  To get the most out of AcuBase Pro, we highly recommend that users enter as much information about the patient (address info, provider, case details, default billing preferences) as possible before creating invoices. That way, clicking New Invoice will create the whole invoice for you, including all Superbill and./or CMS form information. Read on to find out how to do this.

The Search button at the top of each screen will take the user to a blank Find screen where one may find by any field on any layout in the Patients section. (See “Getting Started with AcuBase Pro” for important details on finding records.)

Show All ” brings the user back to the View As List screen and brings all patient records back into the found set—especially important after doing a find/search, when you may only be looking at selected records.

New Patient will take users to a new, blank patient details screen to enter new patient data.

The Delete/Archive button will give you a choice of deleting or archiving the patient in question. Deletes are final—there is no way to recover a deleted patient and their related billing and calendar records unless you retrieve an older version of AcuBase Pro from backup. If you choose to archive the patient, their record will no longer appear in AcuBase Pro’s Patients tab, but billing and calendar references will remain intact, and you may bring the patient back into the database through the “Archive” subtab in the AcuBase Pro Settings (see the chapter on the Settings section for details).

Context-sensitive help is available at the top-right of every screen by clicking on the “Help” button, as well as smaller help buttons scattered throughout specific areas of the program to help with detailed information on that area of the program. Putting the mouse/cursor over any given field will usually pop up a description of that field for further assistance. The “Preferences” button will take users directly to the general AcuBase Pro preferences. And of course, the “Back” and “Forward” buttons at the top-right part of each screen will move back and forward through previously-viewed screens (not including Edit screens, for security reasons.)