The first two things to fill in on the Accession Header are the Laboratory and the Accession Number. Luckily, these two things are often filled in for us (depending on your institution). If they aren't, fill them in.
The Received Date will be filled in as well, with it defaulting to the current date. Change this as necessary.
The next thing to do is fill in the contacts. How many and which contacts you need to fill in are dependent on how your laboratory is set up. If you know the name of a contact, you can just start typing into the field. As you type, search results will appear. If you don't see the result you expect, you can select Search and/or Create New Client from the search results or click on the button.
Find/Add Window
This window is a very useful feature of VetView. If you need to quickly add a client to the system so that you can add him/her to the accession, this window will allow you to do that.
As you type in the information, VetView will be searching among existing clients to see if there are any matches on all or some of the data. This helps prevent duplicate clients from being created.
If you see the client you intended to enter in the Matches By... section, just click on his/her name to add him/her to the accession.
Client Bill/Report Options
After the contacts are entered, you can select one of them as the person responsible for the bill by clicking the circle next to their name in the Bill column. You can choose which client(s) receive reports generated from this accession by clicking one or more checkboxes in the Rpt column.
Fill out the Case Coordinator, Reference Number, Priority, and Hold checkbox as required by your institution.
Lastly, click the button. This will open up the patients/specimens/tests section and the rest of the Accession Tabs.
Patient/Specimen/Test Tree
After you've filled in the Accession Header, the next thing you'll want to do is add the patient/specimen/test information. In VetView, this information is presented in the form of a tree.
Building the Tree
This is what the blank tree will look like when you begin:
To add a patient, click the button, double-click on the <Add New Patient> text, or right-click on the tree somewhere and choose Add New Patient. A pop-up window will appear and you'll be able to enter all the relevant information.
When you're done, you'll have an entry in the tree something like this:
Notice that now there is a spot that says <Add New Specimen> under the newly added patient. To add a specimen, double click on this, click the button, or right-click on the new patient and choose Add New Specimen. Another pop-up window will appear and you can enter the specimen's information.
After you're done, your tree should look something like this:
Again, notice you have a new piece of placeholder text, this time for <Add New Test>. If we want to add a test for our patient/specimen, you have the same options as earlier, the placeholder text, the button, or the right-click menu. Unsurprisingly, this opens a pop-up window for you to enter the relevant data.
When you're done with that, you should have a tree that is 3 levels deep:
You'll notice that the test is green. Tests are color coded to indicate their status. You can always hover your mouse over the test icon to see the name for the status.
To add more more specimens/tests to your patient or to add more patients, you just build the tree like you we did above. Whenver you're finished adding tests, you can put them all into the Working Status by clicking on the button. If you add a test to the accession after that point, you'll need to press the button again to put the new tests into the Working Status.