Find Patient

There are several ways that 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

Find Patient Button

TreFre Medical toolbar has several buttons. The button labeled Find under the heading Patient in the toolbar (shown at the right) when selected will cause the dialog Find Patient to appear.

Find Patient

TreFre Medical can create lists of all patients that match a specified criteria. You select the criteria and specify the text string to match. 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:

• First name
• Middle name
• Last name
• City
• State
• Zip
• Sex
• Social Security Number

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 "smi*" 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.

Patient Table

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.