We must get a request that starts like this at least once a day. It might be for a marketing campaign (a whitening special to all female patients from 30 to 65 years old), or for recovering from a recall system they used to use that didn't work so well, or preparing for their annual hand-written Thanksgiving cards. But as simple as those requests seem, we're always amazed at how difficult it is to generate the right list in all the Practice Management Systems (PMS's).

"And can I export the names and addresses to a file that I can send to my printer?"

Seems like another simple request, but it's amazing how many hoops you have to jump through to export a patient list in an industry-standard file format.

"Oh, one more thing. I want to see only one name per family in the list, so I don't send duplicates. Can you do that?"

This one is practically impossible for any PMS to handle, it seems!

PLZ has a feature called Patient Groups. You can create one in about a minute, just by checking various checkboxes and filling in various fields. (Like patient age, last visit date, month of birthday, etc.) With another checkbox, you can eliminate the duplicates in a family if that's appropriate. Finally, you can either send one of the PLZ messages to everyone in the Group, or you can click a button to export the list to a "CSV" file, which can be used by any company that deals with mailing lists.

We recently had a client contact us about their annual "Thanksgiving Card Ordeal". In less time than it took for them to tell us what they used to have to do, we had created and exported the appropriate patient list to a file that they could email to their printer. To say they were grateful is an understatement!