Design Philosophy

The design of IntelliPract® / InSched is guided by the philosophy that software should make our lives easier and better, and allow us to do more with less.

In general, that means that the software may be complex to design, but should be easy to use, and should lead the user to do the right thing, but never prevent the user from doing what she needs to do.

Schedule Layout

For example, almost all schedulers other than InSched use off-the-shelf software components to show the schedule. That leads either to wasted space on the screen (if too much time is shown), or some events not being visible (if not enough time is shown).

As the schedule is central to the practice (because all you have to sell is time), InSched rejects that approach. In InSched's default view, each day is shown as a column, with the start and end time shown being dynamically adjusted depending on the events shown within the days that are shown. Days that do not have any events are not shown (because they would be wasted space). For example, if there is nothing on the schedule for Saturday, Saturday generally does not need to be shown. However, if you add an event on Saturday, now Saturday will be shown.

On the other hand, every aspect of the schedule display is adjustable, and users can save their preferred views, to be brought up with a single keystroke if they want.

Guidance and Flexibility

Another important matter of philosophy is that the software should guide the user to do the right thing, but not prevent her from doing what she need to do. A good example is double or triple booking, putting more than one event at the same time

The practice can turn on a notice to alert the user if she is booking two events that require the same resource at the same time (and shows it graphically on the schedule). Also, the practice can turn on a notice to alert the user if she schedules an event that extends beyond the block it is scheduled for.

But sometimes those rules need to be broken. Sometimes it is necessary to put two or more patients at the same time, and the software should not require the user to jump through hoops to workaround that limitation.

Audit Tracking and Initials

However, with power comes accountability. Mistakes will happen, so it is essential that practice managers and users can easily determine what happened when there are questions. Did someone accidentally remove an event from the schedule, or had it never been created? What did the schedule look like this morning, yesterday, or last week?

Tracking all changes to the schedule and other data tables is essential to answering those questions. When InSched was designed, none of the available scheduling systems handled audit tracking at all, although once InSched introduced it, others added it as well.

But just because there is an Audit Track does not mean it is easy to see the important changes that have occurred. InSched can quickly show you how the schedule looked at any time in the past, and has a Time Machine view that lets you step back step-by-step to see the changes that were made.

Tracking the initials of the active user is also an important feature of InSched. At some practices, staff go from station to station, making entries on several different computers. That is allowable for most Cosmetic Surgery practices which, because they do not bill Insurance, are generally not HIPAA Covered Providers. However, if the Audit Track is based solely on the station and logged-in user, it will not show who actually made the change. Because of that, and at the suggestion of one of Dr. Nachbar's staff, InSched collects the initials of the user actually at the keyboard whenever a change is made to any data in InSched. (Like almost everything in InSched, that can be configured by the practice.)

Paperless Charting

Charting is an essential operation in any practice, and was one of the earliest features to be added to eletronic management systems. However, the bureaucrats got there before the physicians, and they realized that computers could collect lots of data, far more than could easily be recorded on paper. EMRs,