A guide to making the most of the Synergy Report Manager.

Previous articles in eTorus have talked in great detail about the construction of Reports and the Reporting language so for a technical description of how Reports and Queries work, please refer back to Rik Smithies' earlier articles.

In this series of articles we are going to consider how we can get the best use from Synergy's Report Manager in general practice, looking at some basic and not-so-basic reports along with the principles used in creating them. Regardless of whether you ultimately use them at your practice, they will serve as an illustration of how the Report Manager can be tailored to suit your own needs.

Finally, we will go into slightly more detail on a few specific areas of the Report Manager, including common problems and their solutions.

Getting Started

Start Report Manager from within Synergy using Reports/Report manager from the main menu. You are now presented with a window containing three sections.

On the upper left is a pane that shows a hierarchy of different folders. Each of these contains reports for different purposes.

There are three root folders called Custom, Meditel and Standard.

• Custom comes pre-filled with many example reports, but it is intended for user created reports and is where you should place your own work.
  
• The Meditel folder retains historical reports from the old days and is best forgotten by most users.
  
• Standard contains those reports that iSOFT either intend for your use, or reports that they may require themselves - for example Home Visit and Full Patient Summary. Don't be tempted to alter these Standard reports directly – I'll explain why later.

Folders can and often do contain sub-folders, and more sub-folders, theoretically ad infinitum. Although this layout may look much like the directory structure in Windows Explorer, this isn't just for convenience of storing reports in a structured manner, as we shall see.

We run an individual report by clicking on it in the lower left pane and then selecting the Run Report command button from the bottom of the right hand pane. However, not only can we run an individual report, but by selecting a folder in the top left hand pane and choosing the Run folder button from the right hand pane you can run a folder which will run all the reports within it. Not only will it run all the folders but all of the sub-folders those folders contain, and so on. Why do this? It is because it can be extremely useful to build a folder which contains a group of reports which need running together, especially if they have to be run in a particular order.