Work the front desk board

Front Desk is reception’s home screen. It answers one question — who is in the building and who is still waiting — and puts the four things a receptionist does all day within one screen of that answer.

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Before you start

The whole Front Desk group — the board, Appointments, Patients and Contacts — depends on the Front desk care area. Switch it on in Settings → Facility; see Care areas. Turn it off and all four entries leave the sidebar together. Patients also appears under Records as Patient Records. Both open the same list and both highlight at once — expected, not a fault.

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What you’re looking at

The page is headed Front Desk, with the subtitle “Who is in the building, and who is still waiting.” Refresh sits top right, though the board reloads itself as people are checked in and out, and wait times tick up on their own. Three tiles run across the top. Each shows an em dash while it loads rather than a zero, so a figure on screen is always a real count. Below the tiles, buttons cover the whole of reception — Check in, Book appointment, New patient and New contact, plus Requeue patient for a hospital selling a consultation rate that covers more than one visit. Each opens a sheet over the board, so you never lose the queue you were looking at. Requeue patient puts a returning patient with a still-valid consultation payment back onto a department’s triage Waiting list, without taking a new payment — see Requeue a returning patient. Not shown for a hospital in Free Clinic Mode, or for a role without the Requeue patient permission. The queue is filtered by four tabs, each carrying its own live count: Waiting {n}, Mine {n}, Checked out {n} and All {n}. Mine is the visits that were assigned to you at check-in and are still here — the answer to “who was given to me?”. The columns are: Four wait bands, and the colours are not what people assume — amber is ordinary waiting, red is the problem: A visit the hospital closed on its own — see Automatic check-out below — carries a small (automatic) note beside the Checked out badge, so it never reads as if a staff member did it. When nothing is queued the board reads Nobody waiting — “Check someone in to see them here.”

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Check a patient in

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Check a patient out

Select Check out on the row — it is only there while the person is still in. It takes effect immediately with no confirmation, because a confirmation on every one would slow a busy desk to a crawl, and because it is reversible: check them back in the same day with Check back in on the row. A checked-out visit from an earlier day shows Earlier day instead — check the patient in again. Select View, or anywhere on the row, to reopen the visit sheet, where Edit, Download PDF, Email patient and Cancel check-in also live. Cancel check-in asks for a Reason, kept with the visit’s audit trail. A visit’s status only changes through these buttons — a checked-in patient can be checked out or cancelled, and a closed visit can only be checked back in — and the arrival time can only be edited while the patient is still checked in.

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Automatic check-out

A visit nobody closes does not stay open indefinitely. Every hospital checks out an unattended visit on its own after a fixed window — 24 hours by default — unless the patient is still in care: an open triage, a consultation in progress, or a current ward admission all hold the visit open past the window, and it becomes eligible again once care ends. The recorded check-out time is the arrival time plus the window, exactly — never the moment the sweep happened to run. The visit is marked automatic, with no staff member credited, and sends no notification, email or automation run.

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When the hospital or a clinician is out of office

If the hospital, or the clinician a patient is here to see, is marked out of office when you check them in, the check-in stops and asks first. The message names who is away and when they are back — for example “The clinic is out of office until Sep 23, 12:00 AM (America/New_York). Check this patient in anyway?” — and offers Check in anyway.

• A block for the whole hospital or all staff is checked first, then the clinician on the appointment, then the one the visit is assigned to.
• The time checked is the arrival time on the visit, in the hospital’s time zone.
• Anyone who can use the board can confirm, and nothing is saved until they do.
• The visit shows a During Out of Office badge next to the patient’s name on the board, in the visit sheet and on the patient’s history.
• Returning a visit to the board with Check back in during a block asks the same way (Reopen anyway). Check out, Edit and Cancel check-in never ask.

The patient is physically present, so nothing that happens at check-in is paused: the visit record can be downloaded or emailed, and check-in automations still run.

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Your patient has arrived

Checking someone in tells the right clinician right away — an in-app notification, and an email unless they’ve turned it off. It never names the patient or says why they’re here: just an arrival time and a link back to this board. It goes to:

• the clinician on the appointment this visit is for, if there is one;
• the patient’s primary provider on their care team, in force right now — this is what still fires for a walk-in, or a visit with no clinician assigned;
• whoever is covering either of them right now, if a coverage delegation is active.

Whoever recorded the check-in never gets their own notice, and a colleague who has never signed in is skipped. Check back in does not send it again — it’s the same arrival, not a new one, and this still runs during an Out of Office block (“check-in automations still run”, above). Two switches decide who gets the email (the in-app bell always shows it to whoever it’s for):

• Settings → Notifications → Patient — the hospital’s switch for this category. Off, and nobody here gets the email.
• Their own avatar → Profile and Settings → Notifications → Product & account emails — each person’s own switch (see Choose which emails you get). Off, and only that person stops getting emailed.

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Set the long-wait threshold

The board prints the current figure under the table: “A visit is flagged as a long wait after {n} minutes. Change this in Settings → Facility.” Set it under Front desk waiting → Long wait after (minutes), between 5 minutes and 8 hours; it starts at 30. See Facility settings. One number drives the tile, the badge and the sort order, so there is only ever one definition of “too long” in the building. It colours a badge and lifts the row to the top — it notifies nobody and escalates nothing.

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Who can do this

Two behaviours surprise people. Enforcement is opt-in per person: someone who has never been saved in the permissions sheet is unrestricted, and the sheet warns “Saving starts enforcing”. And hiding a module from a role in Role Navigation is a convenience, not a security boundary — a denied action is recorded, an allowed one is not. The board also sits behind your two-factor rule. If your hospital requires it and your session is not verified, the whole board is replaced by “Two-factor verification is required to view the check-in board.” — see Two-factor authentication.

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Check it worked

• The patient you checked in is on the Waiting tab with a Just arrived badge and today’s time under Checked in.
• Waiting now has gone up by one.
• Checking them out moves them to Checked out and increments Seen today.

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Common issues

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FAQ