Where hospital numbers and receipt numbers come from
Numbers people read are handed out from blocks reserved in advance, so two machines can both be offline and never issue the same receipt number.
3 min read
A hospital runs on numbers people can say out loud: a hospital number on a card, a receipt number on a slip, a ticket number called across a waiting room. These have to be unique across the whole hospital — and they have to keep working when machines cannot talk to each other.
The problem
If every machine simply took "the next number", two machines that are both offline would both issue receipt 4001. You would not find out until they synced, by which time both slips are in patients' hands.
How Fikacare solves it
Each machine is given a block of numbers in advance, and hands out only from its own block. The front desk might hold receipts 4001–4100 while the cashier holds 4101–4200. Neither can stray into the other's range, so neither can collide, and both can be offline for as long as they like.
When a machine's block runs low it asks for another one the next time it syncs. It does not wait until the block is empty, so a machine that has been reaching the hub normally will not run out during an outage.
A number is taken from the block in the same breath as the thing it numbers. There is no moment where a receipt exists without a number or a number has been used up without a receipt.
What this means for your receipt book
Your receipt numbers will not be one continuous run across the hospital. The cashier's slips might jump from 4118 to 4201 because the range in between belongs to another machine. That is not a missing receipt.
Fikacare knows which numbers were reserved by which machine, so it can tell the difference between:
- a number in another machine's block — normal, not reported;
- a number that was reserved by this machine and never used — reported, so you can find out why;
- a number that was used and then voided — reported, with who voided it and why.
That report is Receipt continuity, and it should be clean at the end of every day.
Numbers that come off a paper card
When your old registers are loaded in, patients keep the hospital number
already written on their card, whatever shape it is. Those numbers do not come
from a block and are not expected to fit the pattern — an old OLD-04120 is
taken exactly as it stands. New patients registered in Fikacare get a number
from the series.