Patient Flow Operations
The three front-of-house Healthcare screens that move a patient from booked appointment through triage to a physical bed — Appointments, Triage & Queue, and Room Allocation.
Overview
Patient Flow Operations is the clinical intake pipeline of the Healthcare add-on. A patient's journey through the hospital starts here: booked or walked in on Appointments, checked in and acuity-scored on Triage & Queue, then matched to a physical bed on Room Allocation. Each screen writes real records that the next screen reads — nothing in this group is simulated.
Walk-in or ambulance patients can skip straight from Appointments to Room Allocation via Direct Room Route, bypassing triage entirely for emergency/VIP cases — the diagram above is the common path, not the only one.
Screen preview
A quick look at the screen. Use the toggle in the corner to switch between the dark and light themes.
Patient journey board: check-in, triage, room allocation and discharge
Quick Start
- Open Healthcare → Appointments and click New Appointment. Search for the patient (or create one inline if Quick Create Master Data is enabled in Settings), pick a department and doctor, and set a date/time.
- When the patient arrives, use the Terminal Patient Check-In console on the right side of Appointments — search by Patient ID or National ID, confirm insurance/eligibility, and click Check-In & Push to Triage.
- Switch to Triage & Queue. The patient now appears in the live queue, sorted by ESI acuity and wait time. Click the row to open the Vitals Intake & Acuity Scoring drawer, enter blood pressure/HR/SpO2/temperature/respiration, and save — an ESI 1–5 level is calculated automatically.
- From the same drawer, either Assign Ward/Bed (routes to Room Allocation) or Order Immediate Diagnostic (routes to Test Orders, see Diagnostics & Lab).
- Open Room Allocation. The patient appears in the Incoming Placement Queue on the right; click them, pick a bed that matches their requirements (e.g. an oxygen point for a low-SpO2 patient), and confirm.
For emergency/ambulance walk-ins
Skip Appointments entirely and use the + Walk-In Intake button directly on Triage & Queue — it creates a minimal checked-in appointment record behind the scenes and drops the patient straight into the queue.
1. Appointments
Purpose: Book, reschedule, and manage the patient appointment calendar, and run a rapid terminal-style check-in console for arriving patients.
Key features
- Table / Calendar toggle — switch between a high-density sortable table and a day-grouped calendar card view of the same schedule.
- Terminal Patient Check-In — a dedicated side console that looks up a scheduled patient by Patient ID (
PAT-2026-XXXX) or National ID and shows their insurance/eligibility status instantly. - Searchable comboboxes — Patient, Department, and Doctor fields all use the shared searchable combobox; Patient supports inline quick-create when the tenant enables it in Settings → Preferences.
- Visit type & priority — Routine, Emergency, or Follow-up, which pre-fills the triage priority once the patient is checked in.
Integration triggers
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Check-In & Push to Triage | Flips the appointment to Checked In and adds the patient to the live Triage & Queue list immediately. |
| Direct Room Route | For emergency/VIP visits — reserves an emergency bay directly on Room Allocation, bypassing triage. |
AI Assistant
An AI Assistant panel can be opened from the tab on the right edge of the screen. It reads the day's appointment schedule — or, if you've selected specific rows, just that selection — as context and answers questions in a chat interface.
No-Show Patterns
Identifies patients, doctors, or time slots with a disproportionate number of no-shows or cancellations.
Schedule Load Balancing
Summarizes appointment volume by department or doctor and flags unusually light or heavy load.
Insurance Coverage Review
Flags appointments where the patient's insurance status is expired or missing.
Natural-Language Filtering
Translates a freeform question into concrete filter criteria across department, doctor, visit type, or status.
Selection becomes the AI's context
Select a subset of rows before opening the assistant to scope its analysis — for example, select one doctor's appointments and ask it to summarize their day.
Save as Report
Any assistant reply can be saved as a report with one click — it's added to My Reports with a title derived from your question and the current month/year, so recurring summaries stay easy to find later.
2. Triage & Queue
Purpose: A live emergency/outpatient queue ordered strictly by acuity, with a vitals intake console that calculates an Emergency Severity Index (ESI) score and routes the patient onward.
Key features
- ESI acuity sort — the queue orders by ESI level (1 = Immediate/Resuscitation to 5 = Non-Urgent) first, then by wait-elapsed time within the same level; color-coded quick-filter chips let a nurse jump straight to a severity band with one click.
- Live wait counter — a running minutes:seconds clock per patient, and monospace vital-sign telemetry chips (BP, HR, SpO2, temperature, respiration rate) once vitals are captured.
- Isolation warning badges — Infectious Risk, Fall Risk, and Pediatric tags surfaced on the queue row and settable from the vitals drawer.
- + Walk-In Intake — a direct-acceptance flow for ambulance or walk-in emergencies with no prior Appointments record; creates a minimal checked-in appointment and immediately queues the patient.
- Search & pagination — filter by patient name, protocol ID, or National ID; the table paginates at 15 rows on wide screens / 10 on laptop screens, per the platform's standard.
Integration triggers
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Assign Ward/Bed | Sends the patient to Room Allocation's Incoming Placement Queue, carrying the ESI level over as a priority hint. |
| Order Immediate Diagnostic | Opens a diagnostic order that appears in full on Test Orders (see Diagnostics & Lab). |
AI Assistant
An AI Assistant panel can be opened from the tab on the right edge of the screen. It reads the live triage queue as context and answers questions in a chat interface.
Acuity & Vitals Judgment
Helps interpret what a set of vitals implies about likely ESI level and flags entries that may be under-triaged.
Wait-Time Patterns
Identifies patients who have waited longest, especially at higher acuity, which should almost never happen.
Isolation & Safety Flags
Surfaces entries with infectious-risk or fall-risk warnings that need extra precautions.
Queue Summarization
Summarizes the current queue composition and the most urgent cases at a glance.
Save as Report
Any assistant reply can be saved as a report with one click — it's added to My Reports with a title derived from your question and the current month/year, so recurring summaries stay easy to find later.
3. Room Allocation
Purpose: A visual ward/bed occupancy matrix grouped by department (ICU, General Ward, ER Bays, Surgical Recovery, …), with an incoming placement queue and downstream discharge/transfer actions.
Key features
- Bed status cards — monospace Bed ID (e.g.
ICU-B04), occupant name/ID, attending physician, live admit-duration counter, and a status badge (Available, Occupied, Sanitizing/Cleaning, Reserved, Discharge Pending). - Incoming Placement Queue — consumes both triage-cleared patients (from Triage & Queue's Assign Ward/Bed) and direct-routed emergency patients (from Appointments' Direct Room Route) in one unified list.
- Feature-matched assignment — the assign modal filters candidate beds by the patient's requirements (e.g. an oxygen point for low SpO2, an isolation room for infectious-risk patients) against each bed's actual features.
Integration triggers
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Initiate Discharge | Marks the bed Discharge Pending and generates a live discharge checklist dossier — the still-in-development Discharge Tracking screen will manage it end to end. |
| Transfer Ward | Relocates the patient to a different department's bed, releases the old bed to Sanitizing, and logs a ward-transfer audit trail entry. |
AI Assistant
An AI Assistant panel can be opened from the tab on the right edge of the screen. It reads the department/ward bed occupancy matrix and incoming placement queue as context and answers questions in a chat interface.
Bed Capacity Analysis
Summarizes occupancy and availability by department and flags departments running near full capacity.
Occupancy Pattern Review
Identifies beds occupied unusually long, or departments with many beds stuck sanitizing or discharge-pending.
Placement Queue Pressure
Relates the incoming placement queue size to available capacity and flags a mismatch.
Facility Summarization
Summarizes overall facility bed capacity and occupancy at a glance.
Save as Report
Any assistant reply can be saved as a report with one click — it's added to My Reports with a title derived from your question and the current month/year, so recurring summaries stay easy to find later.
End-to-end data flow
| Source screen | Action | Target screen / record |
|---|---|---|
| Appointments | Check-In & Push to Triage | New queue entry → Triage & Queue |
| Appointments | Direct Room Route | New bed reservation → Room Allocation |
| Triage & Queue | Assign Ward/Bed | Bed reservation with ESI priority → Room Allocation |
| Triage & Queue | Order Immediate Diagnostic | New diagnostic order → Test Orders (Diagnostics & Lab) |
| Room Allocation | Initiate Discharge | Discharge checklist dossier → Discharge Tracking (in development) |