ePractice
Building your contact database
Contacts aren’t just for invoicing. They can be other practitioners involved in the patient’s treatment, embassies, next of kin or anyone else that you may need to contact. You can even add departments to organisations to add another layer of customisation. Some of these contacts will be unique and only linked to a single patient and others will be linked to multiple patients.
Our guide on Getting Started takes you through the basics of ePractice, including adding a patient. Our guide on Adding linked contacts to your patient takes you through the options of linking contacts in your list directly to a patient from the Patient Details.
Adding a new contact
Select Contacts from the left-hand menu or from the Quick Menu – you’ll be taken to the Contacts page. Once you have a few contacts in your database, you can easily search using the alphabet at the top of the page or by typing in part of their name and filter by contact type to find them.
You can select the type of contact you want to add by clicking one of the following from the right-hand side of the page:
- Add Organisation
- Add Department
- Add Person
Adding an organisation
- Click Add Organisation
- Create New (Organisation) will appear in the right-hand pane
- Enter details as required in the following fields:
- Name
- Payor – ensure you select either Yes or No to indicate if you’ll be sending an invoice to this contact
- Address Type – choose from Home or Office
- Address
- Postcode
- Telecom Contact – choose an option from the drop-down menu (e.g. email) and enter the details then click the disk icon to save it; repeat with other telecoms e.g. mobile
- Contact Type – select from the options in the drop-down menu or click Add Customer Contact Type at the bottom of the list to add a new one and click the disk icon to save it
- Preferred Contact Method – choose one of your telecom contacts to be the preferred method of getting in touch with the organisation
- When you’re adding details the system will automatically capitalise every word and drop capitals from hyphenated ones as you type e.g. Staines-upon-Thames and the surnames Hyde-White and da Vinci will become Staines-upon-thames, Hyde-white and Da Vinci
- Click Title Case On in the top right-hand corner of the pane – the display will change to title case off and you can type in what you need in the correct format
- Remember to click on title case off when finished to reinstate the automatic function
- After adding the address details you should also indicate whether these are Primary, Billing or both, by ticking the boxes next to the Postcode field – you must tick Billing if you have set the Payor field to Yes
- Once done, click Save on the bottom right of the screen
Adding a department to an organisation
If you’ve previously added an organisation to your contacts database, e.g. an embassy, you can add a department e.g. Accounts Department. Find the organisation from your contacts list and highlight it. The details will appear on the right-hand side of the page.
The Add Department option will become available – click on it and the display will change to Create New (Department). By default, the address will be inherited from the organisation but if the department has a different address you can click Add contact’s own address on the top right of the page.
Check and amend all the details as required as these could be different from the parent organisation e.g. a direct dial telephone number.
Click Save on the bottom right of the screen. The square symbol next to the organisation on the left-hand side of the screen will change to an arrow symbol pointing sideways. When you click on this, the symbol will change again to a downwards pointing arrow and all the departments/people linked to the organisation will show.
Adding a person
- Click Add Person
- Create New Person will appear in the right-hand pane
- Enter details as required in the following fields:
- Title
- First Name
- Last Name
- Initials
- Payor – ensure you select either Yes or No to indicate if you’ll be sending an invoice to this contact
- Job Title
- Qualifications
- Collection service paper only – to stop invoices being sent electronically to that contact (only used if you’ve registered for Online Payments)
- Address Type – choose from Home or Office
- Address
- Postcode
- Telecom Contact – choose an option from the drop-down menu (e.g. email) and enter the details, then click the disk icon to save it; repeat with other telecoms e.g. mobile
- Contact Type – select from the options in the drop-down menu or click Add Customer Contact Type at the bottom of the list to add a new one and click the disk icon to save it
- Preferred Contact Method – choose one of your telecom contacts to be the preferred method of getting in touch with the organisation
- When you’re adding details the system will automatically capitalise every word and drop capitals from hyphenated ones as you type e.g. Staines-upon-Thames and the surnames Hyde-White and da Vinci will become Staines-upon-thames, Hyde-white and Da Vinci
- Click Title Case On in the top right-hand corner of the pane – the display will change to title case off and you can type in what you need in the correct format
- Remember to click on title case off when finished to reinstate the automatic function
- After adding the address details you should also indicate whether these are Primary, Billing or both, by ticking the boxes next to the Postcode field – you must tick Billing if you have set the Payor field to Yes
- Once done, click Save on the bottom right of the screen
Want more support?
Our Service Delivery Associates at the Healthcode Academy can take you through a 20-minute 1-2-1 session on everything you need to know about your contacts database. Check out the module here.
