There are several ways the TFM refers to a person. A person can be a patient, a guarantor or a provider. TFM uses the same process to locate the details of a person. The following sections of this chapter discuss the process.
| Finding: | a Patient and | the Patient Table, | a Guarantor and | the Guarantor Table, | a Provider |
TreFre Medical can create lists of all patients that match a specified criteria.
On the TFM Tool Bar, the Find Patient button can be used to display
the screen shown on the right. A typical example of this capability might be to
list all people with the same last name or all female patients living in a
particular city. Any combination of the following fields can be used for the
search criteria:
The pull-down list box located under the Find Patient Criteria heading is used to indicate which criteria field to use. Simply select a field from the pull-down enter the data to match and select the Find button. If more than one field will be used as the matching criteria, after making your selection, select the Add button. Your selection will be added to the Selected Criteria box directly below and the field will be removed from the pull-down list box. After all criteria have been entered, the Find button can be used to list the patients that match all the criteria. Note that ALL criteria listed must match to locate and list a patient. There is no method provided to locate patients based on one criteria OR another criteria. The Selected Criteria box can be cleared and this operation restarted by selecting the Clear button.
Often a name is very long or difficult to spell and it is not convenient to type the complete name. A wildcard character, the "*" can be used to match any set of characters. For example: to find all patients with the last name starting with "Sm", the criteria "Sm*" could be used.
The search criteria are not case sensitive. Search fields containing the last name of "sm*" would match "Smith" as well as "small".
If all patients should be listed, the Find All button can be used immediately when this screen is opened. A very common use of a patient list is to search by last name. When this screen is initially opened, the wildcard character is automatically inserted in the last name field and the cursor is inserted directly in front of it. The user can simply type a few characters of the last name and hit the Find button.
When performing various tasks throughout TreFre Medical, many TFM screens will contain a Set Patient button that invokes and display this screen to locate patients. If only one patient matches the selected criteria, a table is not displayed, but rather the found patient data is returned to the specific screen to be used as appropriate. If more than one patient matches, a "Patient Table", illustrated below, will be displayed allowing selection of the appropriate patient from a list.
The Patient Table shown at the right is one of the TFM
Search Tables.
The only field in the table is the patient full name.
The only difference between finding patients and guarantors is that an additional criteria field, Payer is provided. Refer to the chapter, Search Tables for a complete discussion on entering search criteria. The table of found guarantors is illustrated below.
The three fields in the guarantor table are the guarantor full name, the payer name from the coverage that is assigned to this guarantor and a unique identification number. This ID number is assigned to each guarantor/coverage. Occasionally, you might have the same guarantor with the same payer multiple times. This can happen, for example, with expired coverages where the guarantor gets a new policy with the same payer. This unique identification number helps to uniquely identify them and is only displayed in this screen. It is never used or entered in any other TreFre Medical screen.
Finding providers is not typically necessary but can be achieved by using the Configuration menu and selecting Provider.