Configuring Required Tasks, Alerts, and Display Options in the Patient Flow Screen

The Patient Flow screen is where your front desk team handles the bulk of daily patient movement, from check-in through check-out, and ChiroTouch gives you a dedicated Setup panel (accessible via the button in the upper-right corner of the screen) to define exactly how that process should behave. Rather than relying on memory or a printed checklist taped to a monitor, you can encode your office's standards directly into the software. This means a new hire on their first week follows the same sequence as a veteran who has been at the desk for three years, and the system itself flags when a step is skipped. For practice owners and office managers, the setup screen is where you translate "we always want the chart note finished before the patient leaves" into a rule the software enforces every single day.

Under Required Tasks for Check Out, ChiroTouch lets you set three levels of enforcement for Charges, Diagnoses, and Chart Note: Optional, Warning, or Required. If you choose Optional, the system stays silent even if the task is incomplete, which is useful during a transition period when you are still training staff. Warning mode prompts the user with a notification but still allows the check-out to proceed, giving the team a chance to correct the oversight without halting the line. Required mode blocks the check-out entirely until the task is completed, which is the setting most offices settle on once their workflow is mature. The practical effect is that a front-desk associate cannot accidentally send a patient home with an unposted charge or a missing diagnosis code, and the provider's chart note becomes a hard prerequisite rather than a "get to it later" item.

Treatment plan alerts add a second layer of visibility that keeps both staff and providers aware of where a patient sits in their course of care. For providers, you can configure ChiroTouch to display an alert when they open a patient's record if either the current phase is complete or the entire multi-phase plan has been finished, prompting a conversation about next steps or a care-plan update. For front desk staff, a separate "Appointments needed" checkbox activates alerts at check-out, and you can choose whether the alert reflects the entire treatment plan or only the current phase. This is particularly helpful in offices that run multi-phase protocols: the front desk can see at a glance that a patient is three visits short of completing phase two and flag it for the provider without having to open the chart themselves.

The Display Options section is where you fine-tune the information that appears next to each patient's name in the Today's Appointments column, and it is one of the most underused parts of the setup. You can specify a character (such as a dollar sign or an exclamation mark) that appears beside a patient's name when their balance due exceeds a threshold you define, and optionally suppress that indicator if a payment of a specified amount was made within a set number of days. An asterisk option flags patients who have stored alerts that were never viewed—say, a patient who was never checked out after a prior visit—so the next time their name appears, the front desk knows there is an unresolved item. You can also set a minute threshold for late appointments (the time gets wrapped in parentheses), choose to sort arrived patients to the top of the list by arrival time or scheduled time, and toggle whether the Patient Card panel appears on the right side of the screen. For offices that print receipts, options exist to include the provider's tax ID, list future appointments, limit transactions to those posted during the current visit, and append a services-acknowledgment line. Taking twenty minutes to walk through each of these toggles with your front desk team during onboarding, or during a slow Tuesday afternoon, will surface the settings that match how your practice actually operates and reduce the small daily frictions that add up over a month of full schedules.

Sources and further reading