Running a practice on it · 4 of 4
More than one location
Two different shapes of multi-site, and what is shared in each. The answer is different depending on which one you have.
More than one location means two different things, and which one you have decides what is shared.
One practice with several locations
If your sites operate as one practice, with one patient list people move between, they are locations inside a single practice.
Patients, notes, fee schedules, carrier answers and team permissions are shared across them. Someone seen at one site and treated at another has one record. A person can have a home location while working across all of them.
Separate practices
If your sites operate independently, with their own patients and their own books, they are separate practices.
Then the separation is complete. Patient information is isolated at the boundary, and nobody at one can see anything at the other. Someone who works at both holds membership at each, with permissions set independently, so a dentist can be an owner at one practice and an ordinary member at another.
Choose by whether the patient list is shared. That is the question that decides it. One shared list means one practice with locations. Separate lists mean separate practices, and the isolation is the point rather than an inconvenience.
A group layer above both
For an organization holding several practices, there is a level above that exists for reporting and analytics across them. It is not a shared clinical record, and it does not merge patient information between practices.
The one thing that travels between practices
Worth being explicit, because this is the exception.
What Mesio has learned about how a practice management system is laid out is shared across every practice on that same system. That is why the product improves without anyone requesting it.
What is shared is the shape of a screen, never anything about a patient or a practice. And a newly learned layout is used only by the practice that produced it until it has actually been proven, so somebody's one-off is not pushed onto you.