Customising Appointment Captions in the Diary

We sometimes get asked if it’s possible to fully customise “auto-description” captions for appointments in the diary – to which the answer is: YES!

Firstly, please follow these instructions :-

  • Go to the diary and click the DIARY OPTIONS button (top right)
  • Click the “Visual Settings” tab
  • Notice there are 2 caption formats; one for “staff view” and one for “room view”…  these are the boxes you will be editing

There are six standard ‘merge fields’ available, as follows :-

{patient} = the name of the patient/contact attending the appointment
{type} = the appointment type (e.g. “Consultation”)
{status} = the status of the appointment (e.g. “Arrived”)
{clinic} = the name of the clinic where the appointment is booked (usful for multi-site clinics)
{staff} = the name of the practitioner involved in the appointment
{room} = the room that the appointment is booked in
{patcat} = the patient’s category
{patstatus} = the patient’s status

For sake of argument, let’s say we’re working in the STAFF VIEW.

The default caption format is :-
{patient} [{type}] in {room}

This displays the patient’s name, then the type of appointment, then the room e.g.
Bloggs, Joe [Consultation] in Room 1

But what you if you want to add information from a different field? Please read on…

Constructing Custom Merge Field Codes
‘Merge field’ codes are all enclosed in curly braces i.e. {…} For custom merge field codes, THREE parts are required inside the braces :-

  1. The database table name
  2. The field which is displayed
  3. Mapping information for mapping the information to this appointment

Each of the above is separated by an exclamation mark character i.e. “!”.

For example, say we have added a custom field to our patient database called “my_text_field”. To add this field to the caption, we would need to add the following ‘merge field’ code to the caption format :-

{custom_patient_fields!my_text_field!per_id=@per_id}

Hence the final caption format would be something like :-
{patient} [{type}] in {room} - {custom_patient_fields!my_text_field!per_id=@per_id}

  1. The database table = “custom_patient_fields”
  2. The field name = “my_text_field”
  3. The “per_id” field in the “custom_patient_fields” table is mapped to @per_id which is the per_id of the appointment

This would result in :-
Bloggs, Joe [Consultation] in Room 1 - some custom info

A Note About Performance

Including additional custom fields in the auto-generated captions WILL affect performance because ClinicOffice will have to perform an additional database lookup for every appointment that is displayed in the diary.

If you’re non-technical, then this is obviously going to be quite difficult to follow so please feel free to contact us with more information about what you’re trying to achieve and we’ll be happy to help!