How to export your schedule from Compulink

Which practices use Compulink

Compulink is best known in eye care, but it isn't eye-care only. The company lists optometry, ophthalmology, dermatology, gastroenterology, orthopaedics, otolaryngology, pain management, physical therapy, podiatry, urology, behavioral health, addiction treatment and general medicine among the specialties it serves, plus ambulatory surgery centers.

That matters for this guide in one way: Compulink publishes separate help for its specialty editions. The steps below come from Compulink's online help, and the Appointment Statistics report appears in more than one edition with the same menu path. If something on your screen looks different, check the help for your edition and version.

Step by step: the Appointment Statistics report

According to Compulink's online help, you need the user profile right Appointment Analysis Reports to run this report. If the menu item is missing, ask whoever manages security in your practice. Then:

1. Go to Report > Appointment > Analysis > Statistics.
2. Set Location, Provider and Department, or leave them at all to include everything.
3. Enter the Appointment Period start and end dates. For a first look, use the past 90 days; for daily work, the past week and the next few weeks.
4. Leave Appt Status at all statuses, or enter specific status codes if you only want, for example, No Show and Canceled.
5. Use Appt Reason if you want to isolate certain appointment types, such as comprehensive exams.
6. Set Patient Detail to True. Without it, you get summaries only; with it, the report adds line-item appointments.
7. Run the report.

What the report gives you

Compulink's help describes several summary sections: appointment status by provider, by location and by department; appointment reason by provider, by location and by department; and status by appointment reason. With Patient Detail on, the Appointment Statistics Detail section lists individual appointments with patient names, times and durations.

The summaries answer the management question: which provider, location or appointment type is losing the most visits? Compulink notes that practices often run this report at month end to spot cancellation patterns. The detail section answers the operational question: which patients do we contact?

One gap to check for yourself: the help doesn't say whether the detail section includes phone numbers. If it doesn't in your version, you'll need a second report or a data-mining export that adds account number and mobile phone, so outreach doesn't depend on looking up each patient by hand. Compulink support can tell you which option fits your setup.

Exporting from the report viewer

Compulink reports open in a Crystal Reports viewer. Its help page on viewing, printing and exporting describes an Export button on the viewer toolbar that opens a dialog with a choice of formats and destinations. The defaults are Adobe Acrobat (PDF) to a Disk file.

A PDF looks tidy but is hard to work with. For a file you can sort, filter or hand to a vendor, change the format to Microsoft Excel 97-2000 - Data only (XLS), which Compulink's help recommends for Data Mining exports, or to CSV. The data-only Excel option keeps rows and columns clean instead of reproducing the printed layout with page headers and subtotals.

Putting it on a schedule with PracticeWatch

Running the same report by hand every morning is the step most offices eventually skip. Compulink's PracticeWatch is built for this: according to its help, it automates report distribution and batch tasks such as appointment reminders and recall.

Per the help, you add a report task from Utility > PracticeWatch Setup, click Add and choose Report, then give it a name and description, select the report, set its parameters and choose a distribution list. Reports that contain PHI are delivered to the Advantage InBox, Compulink's secure internal messaging, rather than to regular email. There is a Contains No PHI checkbox for reports that can be emailed; an appointment list with patient names is not one of them, so leave it unchecked.

Illustrative math for an eye care practice

These numbers are illustrative. A two-doctor optometry practice runs Appointment Statistics for last month with Patient Detail on. It shows 64 No Show and 88 Canceled appointments. Comparing the detail rows with the next 60 days of the schedule, 70 of those patients have nothing booked.

Say a comprehensive exam is worth $160 before any eyewear. Rebooking half of the 70 is 35 exams, or $5,600, and in eye care the exam is often only the start of the visit's value. The status-by-reason summary in the same report shows whether contact lens follow-ups or annual exams are slipping most, which tells the front desk where to focus. For more on the specialty, see revenue recovery for optometry practices.