Sneak peek – Practice Wide Client Details Layout

One of the great features of myPractice is the ability to customise the Client History and Consultation areas to suit your particular needs.  You can add, remove and resize fields.. you can add tabs and rename existing tabs and fields to suit your data gathering needs.

When it was designed originally it was with the thought of having ‘maximum flexibility’.  We had been approached by customers that share offices with people in different professions, therefore we were aware that enforcing a single layout would not work for those customers. e.g. If you have a Dietitian sharing offices (and Reception staff) with an Exercise Physiologist and a Speech Pathologist – then each would obviously have hugely differing requirements in regards to data gathering.

With that scenario in mind we decided to implement ‘User Specific’ layouts.  Each user would have their own layout and could customise it to suit themselves.

To a certain degree this has been successful, however in the vast majority of cases we have found that this hasn’t been needed and groups of say, Psychologists, working out of the one office prefer to utilise the same layout across all computers and Staff members.

This has caused a problem – to distribute the layout to everyone it has required that files be copied and pasted between user folders and computers to ensure everyone had the same setup. It’s far from ideal and those that have been through the process will be nodding in agreement I’m sure.

In the upcoming version of myPractice we are introducing an optional Practice Wide layout option.

This is how it works – a User designs and makes changes to the layout.  Once the layout is completed, it can be saved to the database from the Options > Client Details page.  Saving requires an Administrator of the system to enter their password.  (This is to prevent users from inadvertently overwriting the Practice Layout.)

To ensure that we keep the flexibility in the system, the use of ‘Personal’ vs. ‘Practice’ layouts can be defined on a user-by-user basis. i.e. if you have 4 users and 3 want to use the same layout and one doesn’t, the single user can choose to use their ‘Personal layout’ whilst the other 3 use the Practice Layout.

We believe this addition will help make life even easier for our Network edition and myPractice ‘Live’ customers.