Patients & charts

One search box

Wherever you look for a patient, one search box takes a name, a phone number, or a file number — it works out which one you typed and matches as you type. If nobody matches, you can register the walk-in on the spot from the same box, so a new patient never interrupts the queue.

The order patients come back in

Search results — and the patient list itself — are ordered by last contact with the clinic: whoever was booked, seen, or paid most recently comes first. In a clinic where forty people share a first name, that is usually the difference between the right chart being at the top of the list and being somewhere in the middle of it.

Every row says which date put it there: Last activity · 3 months ago for someone who has been in, or Registered · 2 years ago for someone who was added and never came back — so you can tell a returning patient from a new one before you open the chart.

Registering a patient

A patient needs a name and a phone number; everything else — date of birth, sex, blood type, address, email — can be filled in as you learn it. Angel assigns a file number (MRN) automatically; clinics that bring their own numbering can enter file numbers manually.

Egyptian names are first-class: Arabic script everywhere, and a middle (father's) name that appears wherever the patient's full name is used — including WhatsApp messages.

The chart

A patient's chart is the one place for everything about them: visits, prescriptions, lab orders, documents, payments, appointments, allergies and conditions. From the chart you can book an appointment, start a visit, order labs, or send a referral.

Allergies

Anyone on the team can add an allergy — if the receptionist hears "I'm allergic to penicillin", it goes on the chart immediately. Removing one is a clinical decision and needs a practitioner, with a named confirmation. Allergies power prescribe-time safety checks: see Prescribing safety.

Tap an allergy to see it in full and to correct its severity — "a rash last year" that turns out to have been anaphylaxis. Raising a severity is open to everyone, like adding one: over-reporting is safe. Lowering one retracts part of a safety flag, so it follows the same rule as removing the allergy — practitioners only, and it is recorded in the audit trail.

Conditions

Conditions carry a status: active, chronic, or resolved. Resolving a condition stamps the date, so the chart reads "From March · Resolved August" instead of losing history. A diagnosis made during a visit can be promoted to the conditions list in one step, carrying its ICD-10 code and the visit date as onset. Changing a condition's status is a practitioner's call; notes and onset date are open to all staff.

Importing patients

Moving from another system or a spreadsheet? Patient import (web only) takes Excel workbooks (.xlsx), CSV and TSV files, recognizes column names in over a hundred common shapes — in Arabic as well as English, so a sheet headed الاسم الأول / رقم الموبايل / تاريخ الميلاد maps itself — shows you a preview, and lets you decide whether duplicate phone numbers merge into the existing chart or get skipped.

The mapping step tells you where every column landed: auto for the ones Angel matched, unmatched for the ones it didn't (those are left out unless you pick a field), manual for a field you chose yourself, and skipped for a matched column you decided to leave out.

Two things Excel does to a patient list, Angel undoes: dates of birth are read out of Excel's own date cells rather than however they happen to display, and a mobile number Excel stored as a number gets its leading zero back. An older .xls file needs one step first — open it in Excel and use Save As → Excel Workbook (.xlsx) or CSV.

A CSV saved by Excel on an Arabic Windows machine isn't UTF-8, which is why Arabic names from an older system so often arrive as ????. Angel notices and reads the file the old way instead, and says so above the preview — glance at the names there, and if they still look wrong, re-save the file as CSV UTF-8.

A row is only turned away when something a chart cannot exist without is missing or unreadable — a first name, a last name, a phone number. Everything else costs its own field and nothing more: an unreadable birthday, an address typed into the email column, a sex Angel doesn't recognize. The patient still arrives, that one field arrives blank, and the preview strikes through the value it is about to leave out. After the import, a list tells you which row lost which field, so you can fill it in from the chart whenever you like.

Sex is read in Arabic as well — ذكر / أنثى / آخر next to male / female / other — and a date written in Arabic-Indic numerals (١٥/٠٥/١٩٩٠) reads exactly like 15/05/1990.

Duplicates & merging

If the same person ends up with two charts, merge them from the chart: pick the survivor, and the other chart's visits, documents and history fold in. Merging is permanent and asks for confirmation.