Setting Up Your Units

This is where you assign the characteristics of your unit.

• Name:  The name of your unit, e.g. the name for a large functional area (like Small Anime Hospital) or a sub-unit within the larger parent unit
• Description:  Brief additional details for this unit, if the name does not reflect functionality.
• Parent Unit:  For sub-units, which parental unit it falls under.  Top level functional units do not need a parent.
• Receiving Unit:  This indicates that the unit is allowed to receive requests from other areas of the hospital.  This displays the unit on the Requests screen. 
• Income Unit: The unit is revenue generating or a profit center and will need to have income credited towards it.  This displays the unit on Orders and on certain Accounting screens.
• Active:  The unit is active in the hospital.  You can never fully delete a unit so that all the historical information is preserved, but an inactive unit will be unable to the system going forward.
• Inventory Area: Indicates that this unit will have its own inventory, rather than pulling directly out of the hospitals primary inventory.  This means inventory can be transferred to this unit in the Inventory system.
  • Auto Receive Inventory:  The transfers to this unit will be accepted immediately and do not require confirmation.
• Only Assigned Users Can Schedule Appointments:  Restricts any appointment types associated with the unit to only members designated as part of the unit.  Check this if appointments must be done by the unit instead of your front desk personnel. 
• Address Information:  The address of your Unit.  It can be the same as the parent unit if they are in the same facility, or you can enter in a more specific address if the unit has its own building or wing. 

In order for your unit to be able to store documents on patient episodes or to receive requests to other units in the hospital, you will need to build out the catalogs for the unit.

Catalog Master simply indicates that these catalogs belong exclusively to your unit.  This way you can quickly find them in Catalog Setup.  However, if units change, the parent unit for a catalog can always be changed later on. 

Question Setup:  If your unit is a receiving area and  has a standard set of questions that will need to be filled out with every request, it can be assigned at the catalog level.  These high level questions are only available for Request catalogs.   For example, "Has the client signed the consent form?" for procedures.  More specific questions for each procedure can be assigned at the document level.

Appointment Type Setup

The Appointment Types tab allows you to set up appointment types for the schedules assigned to this unit.  It also allows you to map your appointment type to a default episode type so that the episode order will open with the correct information.  This also allows the episode type to bring in the necessary parts of the medical record for that kind of appointment and episode.  

To add a new appointment type, click on Add and enter in the name of the Appointment type and its associated episode type.

Appointment type names are free text.  This allows you to keep your new appointment types in line with any existing terms or labels used within your hospital.

See Episode Type Setup for more information on how to define your episodes. 

This section allows you to define the schedules for your unit.  Schedules in VetView include internal resources, client appointments, receiving unit time slots - any schedule your unit needs can be initially defined here.

Click on the Add button to create a new schedule.

The schedule name is free text.  Schedules within a unit can be linked to subgroups, so if you wish to maintain multiple types of schedules for your personnel or clients, you can add a group (click on the plus sign) and then create multiple schedules with that group.  Group names are optional, however, so for a small unit with no sub-groups, it can be left out.

See Schedule Setup for more information.

Product Mapping

This section allows you to auto-associate products that are coming in through another interface to VetView with your unit, such as machine reports sent in HL7 via the API or charges from a lab.  If you turn this on, then the first time an incoming charge is sent to VetView that is associated with your unit but unknown in the system, it will automatically create a new product in the inventory, and all future charges with that same code will be associated with that product.  These settings tell the inventory system the basic defaults for new products tied into your unit, so that the charges applied in the system can be tracked on Orders appropriately. 

These mappings only apply to new unknown charges being submitted to VetView through an outside interface.  Products defined manually first can be customized further in the Product Setup screens. 

• Auto Add Product:  Turning this flag on enables auto-adding for your unit.  Only enable this if you want labs or other outside interfaces to auto-build products in VetView when a new charge is applied to a bill associated with your unit. 
• Default Product Line:  If you are auto-adding products, this is where you will indicate that the auto-generated product should be assigned to this Product Line.  When the system auto-creates a new product code, it will assign the code to this product line, then search for the next available sequence number for the creation of the new product code.  
• Default Mark Up: The available default markups defined in your Product Setup screens.  See Markup Setup for more information.
• Default Service Fee: Indicate service fee to be applied to auto-added products.
  
• Add Charges On: Indicate when you want the charges added by default for this newly added product (the current options are "requested" or "accepted").

Assigned Users

Assigning users to a unit allows those personnel to see private schedules, accept incoming requests to that Unit, and drives other unit-specific future items in VetView. 

It is critical to ensure that users are associated with a Unit, as well as that the user has the required privileges via Role Management to do certain tasks within a unit.  For example, if a user is unable to see any Requests on the Requests screen, it is likely because they have not been assigned to any unit marked as Receiving.  

As of version 1.6.1 VetView does not auto-update a student's assigned unit based on their clinical rotation schedule, so this will still need to be manually managed by your student coordinators.

To add a new user, click on the Add button and search for their last name or first name.  

To remove a user, select the row and click on the Delete button.

Adding or removing a user does not affect functionality in the past on VetView, only going forward in the future.  So if a user is removed from a unit, their name will still be associated with any previous episodes that they worked on for the unit. 

Request Setup

If your unit is a receiving unit, then you can define the statuses that your incoming Requests have available.  You can also set up which personnel will be notified on each status, so that the appropriate people are informed as a request is processed. 

Request status names are hard coded into VetView and cannot be modified. 

Add: Allows you to add a new status for Requests to your unit and associate automatic messaging with different personnel on that status change.  (Statuses not listed will still be available, but no personnel will be automatically messaged.)

Edit: Allows you to edit the notifications associated with the selected status.

Delete: Deletes the status of the selected row and all associated instant messaging.  (The status will still be available for any requests incoming, as defined under the Request setup.)

Populate Statuses:  For hospitals using data migrated from an older EHR system, this will import any existing statuses from previous Requests and allow you to modify them without manually adding them.  This only needs to be done once per unit. 

Patient Locations

If the unit has cages or stalls in the unit, you can define the names of those cages or stalls on this page.  Doing so provides a quick list for those within that hospital unit when assigning patients to that location.  This also allows hospital staff to accurately track the whereabouts of a patient during their stay.  This information feeds to the census and patient location indicators. 

To add a new location name, click on the Add button.  To edit an existing location, click on the row and click on Edit.

Default Charges:  The default boarding charges associated with a location will be applied when the patient is listed on the Patient Census.  The census charges can be set up to apply daily, or also to apply at a regular hourly interval, via the API.  See Patient Census setup for more information. 

Inventory Locations

If your unit has an inventory receiving location or a holding area, you can set up the system to recognize this area as part of your unit. By defining these locations for the unit, you allow other parts of the system to transfer inventory to and from those areas, and also allow inventory to be tracked against it on Episode Orders.

Inventory areas can be defined even if you do not want the ability to perform transfers to and from the area.  

Only one inventory location can be marked as default for each unit.