Receptionist at a clinic

Your day at a clinic's front desk. You register patients with their payer and consent, add them to the queue, check their cover, follow who is due back, and take payment when the desk bills.

Kila describes the role: “Registers patients, books, runs the queue and records the payer. No clinical details; claims stay with the claims office.” You are the first and the last person a patient meets at the clinic.

Kila opens Clinic › Front desk: who is coming, who is here, and what each needs next. At the top, New patient (1) and Add to queue (2). The counts follow: In the building, Waiting over 30 min, Booked, still to come, Cover to check (3), To bill, Billed, still here and Due back today. Below are Booked today and the patients in the building, each with their step, their wait, their clinician and who pays.

The front desk for Lucy Wanjiru, receptionist at Afya Bora Medical Centre: New patient (1), Add to queue (2), the counts with Cover to check (3), Booked today, and the patients in the building.

Your day

Register new patients with their payer, their consent and their allergies: Register a patient.
Add each patient to the queue, and check the cover of those an insurer or scheme pays for: Run the front desk.
Keep the queue moving: call patients, move them on, and put the waiting-room screen on the TV: Run the front desk.
Take payment when the desk bills: Bill a visit.
Follow who is due back: call them or send a reminder to those who agreed to messages, then mark them Called, Booked or Done.

What you can do

Register patients and keep their files, cover and consent under Clinic › Patients.
Run the front desk and the Patient queue, the Waiting-room screen and the Billing desk.
Book appointments under Diary, Calendar and Appointments.

Everything the role is allowed to do

General: View dashboard
Customers: View customers
Services: View services and bookings; Book and manage appointments

What needs a manager

No approval limits: anything that needs approval goes to someone else.

Needs a manager

The clinical record. Where it would be, you see: “Clinical notes, diagnoses and results are visible only to the clinical staff caring for the patient.” A clinician reads it: Clinical privacy.
Claims. They stay with the claims office: Claim from insurers, SHA and schemes.

Common questions

Kila will not add a patient to the queue. Their consent to treatment is not on their file:

That did not go through

… has not given consent to: Treatment. Record it on the patient file first.

Record it on the file, then add them: Register a patient.

The patient already has a visit open. A patient has one open visit at a time. Find it on the Patient queue and carry on with it: Run the front desk.

Do reminders reach the patient’s phone? Not yet. SMS is in test mode until a provider is connected: Kila records each one, and nothing reaches the phone. Call the patient instead.

Health care: the visit from the front desk to the bill.
Nurse: where the patient goes next.
Cashier: the till and the cash, when someone else bills.