Sow vs. sew
As a verb, sow means (1) to scatter seed for growing, or (2) to implant.
The verb sew always relates to stitching, knitting, and other tasks involving a needle and thread or a sewing machine. It also appears in the figurative phrasal verb sew up, meaning to complete successfully or to make sure of.
(Grammarist.com)
Why the title I hear you say? Well …. This next series of blogs could have been called reporting in TM2 or my favourite 10 reports in TM2. But no, I wanted to get a bit deeper, I wanted to get under the soil so to speak. Because if we start at the ground (or under it) you will understand the very nature of reporting in TM2 which will be far more useful to you than just a list.
Under its skin TM2 is a database. That’s basically lots of boxes of information to us non-techie’s. So just like planting seeds in the ground when you enter information into TM2 you are planting seeds in your database. Now here’s the important bit …. You need to put the right information in the right boxes, just like putting the correct seeds in the correct place. If you don’t then what you get can be a bit of a mess. A perfect example of this is if you receive junk mail and your name and address are all jumbled up or in the wrong order or all of a sudden you are no longer a Mr but a Mrs! This is because someone has entered your information into their database incorrectly; they have put it into the wrong box.
Name and address mistakes are a good example of sowing the wrong seeds and demonstrate that when we link these boxes what comes out can be rubbish. Reports in TM2 work by effectively sewing your data boxes together. So think of a needle and thread linking the information to give you a report. We need to make sure that the report is sewing together the right boxes and that the correct information is entered into those boxes. So now you know why the title is called “sow and sew”.
The good news is that whilst you and your colleagues have been happily pressing buttons in TM2 you have been planting seeds into your database. The information is there, you just need to use a report to sew it together and harvest your data!
There are around 50 standard reports which many clinics find suitable to run their businesses, it is possible for you to request custom reports to be built for you and I’ll give you the contact details at the end of the article.
Let’s start by taking a look at the diary section of reports. Here are a few of my favourites:
Appointment cancellations:
When you run this report it shows you how many cancellations each practitioner has had over a selected time frame. Not only this, but if you are recording cancellation reasons these will be displayed too. My favourite part of the report displays if a patient has re-booked or not, as for me the patient who cancels with no reason and hasn’t rebooked is worthy of a courtesy call to see if everything is ok.
Non-actioned appointments:
At the end of every day something should have happened to the appointments in your diary. People either attend, cancel, DNA or perhaps move their appointment. This report picks up on any non-actioned appointments and I think should be ran every day to keep on top of things as a non-actioned appointment has no finance associated with it. I would want to know what is happening with the appointments , why haven’t they been actioned?
Non-billed appointments:
This report shows you any appointments where someone has pressed the “do not bill” button on the quick bill screen. This can often be done as a mistake. However, once this button is clicked it will record the appointment as having taken place in the diary but will not generate any finances, so it’s a “free” appointment and that’s something you need to check!
These three reports should help you to get started harvesting the data from your system. By running reports you will not damage your data so have a play around and see what you come up with. In the next blog we’ll take a look at the other report areas, finance, patient, case and central.