Everyone you deal with who isn't a patient
The Contacts list holds the people and businesses your clinic deals with who aren't patients: suppliers you order stock from, doctors who refer patients to you, couriers, accountants, landlords, or any other outside relationship worth keeping a record of. It's a separate list from your patient database on purpose.
Keeping the two apart matters more than it might first seem. Your patient list feeds clinical records, appointment history, billing, and reporting — every one of those systems assumes a patient record represents someone you treat. Mixing in suppliers or referring doctors would pollute patient counts, patient reports, and recall lists with records that were never meant to be there. Contacts gives those non-clinical relationships a home without touching any of that.
- What kinds of relationships belong in Contacts
- How to search and filter the list as it grows
- How to add and edit a contact
- How to decide whether someone should be a Contact or a Patient instead
Searching and filtering as your list grows
The search bar filters the list by name as you type. That's usually enough for a small handful of suppliers and referrers, but once a clinic has been operating for a while, its Contacts list tends to accumulate — every courier, every specialist a patient has ever been referred to, every one-off vendor. That's what the filter controls are for.
Filtering by category or type — for example, narrowing to only suppliers or only referring doctors — lets you work with a manageable slice of the list instead of scrolling past entries that aren't relevant to the task in front of you, such as pulling up your supplier contacts specifically to reorder stock.
Adding a contact
Open Contacts
Go to <strong>Contacts</strong> from the sidebar.
Click Add Contact
This opens the contact form.
Enter the contact's details
Fill in their name and contact information.
Set a category or type, if your clinic uses one
Tag them as, for example, a supplier or referring doctor, so they surface correctly under filters later.
Save the contact
Click <strong>Save</strong> to add it to the list.
Editing a contact
Find the contact
Search or filter to locate the contact.
Open the contact
Click the contact row to open its details.
Update the details
Change any fields that need updating.
Save your changes
Click <strong>Save</strong> to apply the update.
Contact or Patient? Getting the call right
The rule of thumb is simple: if your clinic treats them clinically, they're a patient; if your clinic deals with them but never treats them, they're a contact. In practice, a few cases are less obvious, and getting them wrong in either direction causes real friction down the line.
| Situation | Use this |
|---|---|
| A person your clinic provides care to, even occasionally | Patient record — they need appointment history, clinical notes, and billing. |
| A doctor who refers patients to you but you don't treat | Contact, tagged as a referring doctor. |
| A supplier you order retail stock or clinical supplies from | Contact, tagged as a supplier. |
| A staff member's family member who is also a patient | Patient record — their relationship to staff doesn't change that they receive care. |
| A business you invoice for services rendered to its employees, where the employees are the ones treated | The employees are patients; the business itself can be a contact if you correspond with it directly. |