The Visit Board is your front-desk command center for the day. It shows who’s coming in and lets you move each client through your office flow. It’s also the clearest way to see the difference between an appointment, a visit, and a case.
Parts of the Visit Board are still being refined; the core behavior below is in place.
1. Open Scheduler from the main navigation (calendar icon).
2. Select the Visit Board tab (alongside Calendar, List, Staff, and Reminders).
The Visit Board is a Scheduler screen. It is not a separate Care Settings page.
• An appointment is a calendar item indicating that a client is scheduled to come in.
• A visit is what happens when the client is physically present and you Start Visit. Each visit is one encounter on a specific day (charts, forms, tests, notes for that time in the center).
• A case is the longer story those visits belong to — an umbrella over every visit about the same concern.
Think of a case as the folder for one continuous concern, and each visit as a page inside that folder.
In pregnancy-center care, a case is usually:
• One pregnancy, often tracked with its own Last Menstrual Period (LMP) and related dates, or
• One pregnancy-related concern you are following over time (follow-up visits, testing, counseling, ultrasound, and so on).
All the visits that belong to that same pregnancy or concern should sit on one case. That keeps charts, outcomes, LMP/due-date context, and history together so staff can see the full picture without hunting across scattered one-off records.
Many centers create a brand-new case every time someone walks in. That works mechanically, but it makes records harder to use:
• History for the same pregnancy gets split across many thin cases.
• Follow-up visits no longer line up under one LMP or outcome story.
• Staff have to open several cases to answer “where are we with this client?”
Better pattern: open a case when the concern begins, then attach multiple visits to that same case as care continues. Start a new case when the client has a new concern (for example a later pregnancy with a different LMP, or a separate issue that should not mix with the prior case).
When the client already has a case on file, Start Visit asks which case this visit belongs to (or lets you start a new one). Use that moment to keep the right visits under the right umbrella.
More on how booking, forms, cases, and visits connect: From Booking to Visit: How Records Flow.
The Visit Board is where an appointment becomes an active visit and moves through your day.
The Visit Board always shows a single location at a time.
If your organization has more than one active location, a location picker appears above the board so you can switch centers.
• Your choice is remembered per user and shared with the location filter on the Calendar and Staff tabs, so switching to a location in one place keeps the others in sync the next time you open Scheduler.
• If you haven’t picked a location before and your organization has more than one, the Visit Board defaults to your saved Scheduler location filter, or otherwise your first available location.
If your organization has only one active location, the picker doesn't appear at all. The Visit Board, Calendar, and Staff tabs all use that one location automatically, since there's nothing to choose.
If the location you had selected is later deactivated or removed, the Visit Board automatically falls back to one of your organization's remaining active locations instead of getting stuck on a location that no longer exists.
The board's stage tracks where the client is in the center's flow. Moving a visit to a completed stage does not substitute for sending, reviewing or signing a Doc Alert. Open the visit's Workspace tab and Ultrasound section to manage its physician review.
The board shows today’s clients and lets staff move them through your center’s stages, for example arrived → lobby → in a room → with an advocate → complete. CoolFocus can show how long someone has been in a status, so a client sitting in the lobby too long stands out instead of being forgotten.
You can rename and reorder these stages to match how your center runs.
Path: Settings → Scheduler Settings → Visit Board → Visit Statuses
An admin can also open the scheduler settings panel from Scheduler and choose Manage Visit Statuses.
Not under Care Settings. Visit Board / Visit Statuses settings live under Scheduler Settings. Care Settings will not show a Visit Board section. Full steps: Customizing Visit Board Statuses.
Click a client and Start Visit to create the case (if needed) and the visit, and pull in everything they submitted. See From Booking to Visit: How Records Flow.
• If the client already has a case on file, CoolFocus asks which case this visit belongs to before opening the workspace, instead of guessing. A dialog lists each of the client’s cases (active and closed) with enough detail to tell them apart: case number, status, when it was opened or closed, and the date and count of the case’s last visits. Pick the case that matches this concern, or choose Start a new case when this really is a new pregnancy or separate issue.
• Choosing Start a new case now asks the case's own questions right there in the same dialog, before the visit opens: initiated date, location/case consultant, case number, LMP date, initial intentions, initial assessment, and potential father (optional). Every question is optional: answer what you know and leave the rest blank. Your answers save onto the new case the moment the visit starts, and if a case answer can’t be saved for some reason, the visit still starts and you’re told to fill it in on the case afterward.
• Picking an existing case skips these questions entirely; nothing about the case is asked or changed.
• Nothing is pre-selected. You have to actively choose a case or start a new one before the visit can begin, so a walk-in who needs a new case can never be entered against the wrong one by accident.
• If the client has no case, Start Visit can open the case step of the staff entry flow when your permissions allow case creation. Save the case details and continue to the visit.
• This applies everywhere a visit can start: the Visit Board, the appointment panel, and the appointment workspace. For walk-ins, the appointment is created first; if a case choice is needed, the Visit Board keeps that walk-in appointment in today’s list while you decide, rather than creating it again.
• If required forms aren’t finished, CoolFocus can prompt you to send them right then, by text or a QR code the client scans on a tablet.
• You can’t start a visit for a future date; Start Visit is for clients who are actually there.
• After you start a visit, a confirmation message shows the visit’s actual starting status (for example, “Visit started - moved to In Lobby”). This reflects whatever your organization has configured as the default status for new visits, so it may say something other than “Waiting” depending on how your center’s stages are set up.
For a client who arrives without an appointment, use the walk-in option, enter their name and reason for the visit, and CoolFocus creates the client and gets them onto the board so they’re tracked like everyone else.
After you start a walk-in visit, the Visit Board stays on screen and refreshes in place to show the new visit; it does not automatically open the client’s workspace. This keeps front-desk staff on the board so they can keep checking clients in without interruption. You can still open the visit from the board whenever you’re ready to work in it.
If the walk-in client already has a case on file, the same case picker appears after the walk-in appointment is created. The appointment is already booked and waiting in today’s list, so choosing a case (or starting a new one) finishes the visit without creating a second appointment for that client.
• Customizing Visit Board Statuses
• From Booking to Visit: How Records Flow
• Forms vs. Charts
• Visits Overview
• Scheduler Overview
• Where Scheduler Settings Live
