The Start page
Sign in, and you are on it. Home, at the top left of every other page, brings you back.
Start opens with your greeting, the day and your organisation. Under them is the menu, a row of buttons for each part of the work, and under the menu one search bar. It finds every kind of record you can open: patients, contacts, organisations and practitioners, expenses, invoices and payments, appointments, operations, operating lists and admissions, your tasks and events, documents, equipment, applications, memberships, enquiries, safeguarding referrals and stock. Only the kinds you have access to are searched, and within each only the records you could open yourself.
Type three letters of a name, a record's number, or an amount with a pound sign. A number finds a record by its number in every kind, such as an expense, an invoice or an appointment. An amount such as £250 finds expenses, invoices and payments of exactly that total first, marked exact total, then the nearest. Start with a kind to look in that kind alone: expense 16521, invoice £1,200, appointment Smith, operation abdominoplasty. Words find tasks, events, operating lists by their hospital or date, payments by reference or patient, invoices by the patient paying them and operations by their title, as well as names. Appointments and admissions are found by their number, or by the patient's name when you start with their kind, such as appointment Smith. A phone number finds patients by their number, and an email address, or the first part of one, finds patients by the address on their contact details.
The results come grouped by kind, each group headed with its kind and each row saying what it is, with a line beneath: a patient's date of birth and town, a contact's role, an expense's category, date and reference with its amount. The letters you typed are marked in the name. Press a row to open the record, or use the up and down arrow keys to move through the rows and Enter to open the one marked. Chips under the bar show how many of each kind there are; press one to see only those. Beside each patient, Write on tablet sends a form to your device. Beside a paid expense, at any organisation where you raise expenses, Another opens the Expenses page with its New expense form filled in from it: the same payee with their usual VAT and terms, and the same type, which decides whether it is confidential. The new one goes into the same organisation's books as the one it copies, whichever organisation you signed in at, and the form says whose. Nothing is created until you enter the amount and press Create expense. New patient, New contact and New organisation start a record from what you typed. A role finds contacts as well as a name does: type RMO, or any other role, and everybody practising here in that role now is listed, each saying Found as and the role.
The search covers every organisation you work at, whichever one you signed in at. Expenses, invoices, quotes, payments, admissions, operating lists, tasks, events, documents, equipment, applications, memberships, enquiries, safeguarding and stock are each found at all of them, and every result is labelled with the organisation it belongs to, so a payee or a patient involved with more than one of your organisations shows all of it together. Each organisation's own rules still apply to you there: you see a record where you hold the privilege for it at that organisation, a confidential expense only as a Director or the person who raised it, and an organisation without a feature, such as memberships, adds nothing for it. Pressing a result opens it at its own organisation.
Beside the search, small pills name anything waiting for you, with how many: unsigned duty schedules, sketches, emails to place, and for the ward team any discharges that are overdue. Amber is waiting, red is overdue. Each pill opens what it names. The overdue discharges pill stays until the admissions are put right.
Recovery diary is a pill for each patient whose recovery diary was sent to you, named on the pill with how many new entries it holds: the practitioner and anyone copied on diary tasks for a diary that came by the text link, and the care team on the task for one sent from the portal. Up to three patients have a pill each and any more fold into one pill, More recovery diaries. It counts entries from the last seven days that you have not looked at, and it is red when one of them needed someone. Pressing a pill opens that patient on their Recovery diary card; opening the card is what takes them off your pills, for you alone. Hold the pointer over a pill to see what is waiting.
Beneath the search is a row of tiles: To do, Schedule, Messages, the Ward for the ward team, and What's new. The Ward counts the patients in at every organisation where you have a ward role, the same ones the Admissions board lists. Each shows one number and a line, such as how many tasks are yours with how many are overdue, today's clinic and list with how many are booked, or how many messages are unread and who sent the latest. While any message is unread the Messages tile is outlined in amber and pulses for about half a minute after the page opens, then stays amber until they are read. The Schedule tile counts everything on today whatever filters the window has on, and says how many of them the filters are hiding, so a window that looks emptier than the tile is explained by the tile. Press a tile and its window opens beneath the row; press it again, or Close, to put it away. One window is open at a time, and the open tile is marked in green.
The Schedule window is your clinics, theatre lists, meetings and leave, with Today, Tomorrow, Week and Month beside the date, and New for an event or a run of clinics. It scrolls inside itself when there is more than it holds, and the day you are looking at stays at the top as you scroll. The From and To boxes wait until you have finished choosing a date before they fetch anything, and a day that does not exist, such as 31 November, is named under the boxes rather than changing the other date. Each clinic is headed with who it is with, the practitioner and anybody else named on the clinic, followed by the place and the room, so whose clinic it is can be read without opening it.
An event opens from search, Go or a link wherever your schedule would show it at any of the organisations you sign in at, had you switched there, such as another organisation's meeting you are named on or one it broadcasts to everybody.
New, then Event, makes one event: its title, day and times, and the event opens for you to finish. Several, beside Make it, takes a whole list instead, such as a year's testing schedule: paste one event per line, the date first and then what it is, in any way you would write a date, with the times from the boxes above applying to every line. Check the list says how many it read and the first and last day, or names the line it could not read; the second press makes them, ten at a time, and the schedule opens on the first day. Tick whole organisation sees them for events everybody should have on their diary.
On today's operating lists, each case the patient is expected for carries Record arrival, with the room beside it where the admission already names one, so you can see where somebody is going before they get there. Press it as they reach the desk and the time is written on their admission; the row then shows that time in a green marker, with the room beside it, or a box to pick the room where none has been chosen yet. A case where the arrival has already been recorded shows the time rather than the press.
Where you sign in at more than one organisation, Record arrival, the room, and sending for a patient work on the cases and appointments of each of them from the same Start, as they would had you switched to that organisation, with each case offering its own organisation's rooms.
Which tiles you see, their order, what each shows first and which window opens when you sign in are yours to choose on Arrange Start, from the menu under your initials.
A notice from a Director or IT Support covers Start when you open it: a change, a reminder, or a message written for you by name. Read it and press I have read this, and it does not come back; if there are several they come one at a time, oldest first. A message written for you by name is shown to you and to nobody else, wherever you sign in.