CLINIC HQ

22.11. Patient Flow Setup

HQ’s Patient Flow Drug Log combines and expedites the process of moving your animals through the system, keeping everything in one spot. With this, the HQ Drug Log automatically calculates the necessary amount of a drug for each animal depending on the animal weight/age information that is input.

Patient Flow & Drug Log Settings

Here you can create your drug protocols and charts, any other drugs, controlled substances, and a variety of other settings like what types of appointments show up in Patient Flow.

The Patient Flow chapter gives an overview of how to set up drug charts and protocols and much more!

Drug Charting

In creating protocols/drug charts, you can create standard or non-standard protocols. A non-standard protocol would be giving a dog extra or different drugs if they are, for example, aggressive or brachycephalic.

Drug charting

Controlled Substance Draw Structure

Most clinics will use Centralized Controlled Substance draw structure. This creates one master drug log for the clinic.
A De-Centralized draw structure is used for larger clinics that may operate teams. The drugs are divided up and assigned to teams. The drug bottle can only be used by the assigned team. A drug log is created for each team.

Controlled Substance Setup

Here you can set up and manage your controlled substance bottles. Add new bottles to this section when your clinic receives them. Create new bottles of compounds as your clinic mixes them up in-house.

Managing controlled substances

By clicking manage for any of the drugs, you can add new bottles, waste bottles in the system and see how a bottle has been used.

Settings

Here you can toggle to enable or disable these options depending on how your clinic works.

  • Does your clinic keep animals overnight as a routine part of spay/neuter surgeries?
  • Does your clinic uses extended exam?
  • Does your clinic want to see rechecks in Patient Flow?
  • Does your clinic want to see Basic Wellness appointments in Patient Flow?
  • Set exam defaults to “normal.” If not enabled, the TPR, Subjective, and Objective will not be auto-selected to normal.

Automations

In Patient Flow, when an animal’s services are completed, staff click the “Done” button. Here, you can enable automatic actions to occur when the animal is marked as done.

When Done is clicked it can do any combination of the following:

  1. You can now set up a rule that puts the appointment in checked out status when the Treatment Sheet Done button is clicked in PF.
  2. When Done is clicked, the HQ automation can then send the take home paperwork to the client by email if there’s an email on file, and if there’s not, then it will text it to the client.
  3. The same thing for Volume Client Owners (VCOs) – it can email the take home instructions, and if they don’t have an email, it will text it.
  4. The automation can auto-send a copy of the paperwork to the printer.
  5. The automation can text the public patients that their animal will be ready to be picked up in X number of minutes. For example, it can auto-text public clients something like “Sam will be ready to be picked up in two hours” when you click the Done button. This automation supports staggered pickups, which we promote. This way, pets don’t have to be at the clinic any longer than necessary, and disaggregating pickups makes checkout less chaotic. NOTE: Text messages are set up in Confirmation & Reminders.

Creating an Automation when "Done" is clicked in Patient Flow.

Clinic HQ has two styles of drug logging: Patient Flow and the “old Drugs tab.”
NOTE that the pre-existing drug logging system for Drugs tab in checkout is no longer supported by Clinic HQ.
The Drugs tab was phased out in 2021 and replaced with Patient Flow. The PF tool is standard for all new clinics that started with Clinic HQ after the fall of 2021. For pre-existing subscribers who do not have Patient Flow, open a help ticket to request this feature be turned on for your clinic.