Patient Alerts, Diets, and Notes

When a patient is not cooperative, has a drug allergy, or needs a specific diet, your whole team needs to know before they walk into the exam room. viggoVet lets you tag patients with alerts, dietary instructions, and notes that surface automatically on the patient sidebar, appointment booking modal, Owners tab, and Status Board. This means critical information follows the patient wherever they go in the system.

Alerts

Alerts are short warnings attached to a patient’s profile. The alerts can be general, dietary or clinical warnings or alerts. They appear as colored tags that are visible at multiple points in the system.

Where they appear:

Diets

Diets are dietary instructions or restrictions that your team should know about. They work exactly like alerts but are categorized separately so you can distinguish clinical warnings from feeding instructions.

Adding an Alert or Diet

1. Open the patient’s profile
2. Click on the three-dot menu on the top right corner of the patient’s information card
3. Click on “add alert” or “add diet”
4. Type the alert or diet text
5. Click on submit

The new alert or diet appears as a colored tag (blue/teal) with an X button for removal.

Removing an alert or Diet

Click the X button on any alert or diet tag to remove it. The alert disappears from all locations in the system immediately.

Patient Notes

You can create notes for your internal staff to deliver for clients. Open “clients” from the main side bar under “accounts”, then open the “notes” tab. Use this field for brief, persistent information that doesn’t fit into alerts or diets, such as “Owner prefers morning appointments” or “Microchip registered to breeder.”

Internal Staff Comments

You can add comments for your staff about every patient by accessing “patients” under “accounts” in the main side bar, then clicking on the “internal staff comments” tab. Click on “create new”, then add your note and drop attachments if there are any. To save, click on “save note”.

If you need to attach a file, use the Upload Attachments section below the text area. Supported formats: JPG, RAW, PNG, GIF, JPEG, PDF, ODT, PPT, PPTX, DOC, DOCX, CSV, XLS, XLSX. Maximum file size is 500kb per file.

The page shows all existing comments with sorting controls (Created At, Ascending), a Search field, and a Create new button.

Important: Internal Staff Comments are internal only. They are NOT included when you export the patient file. Use them for sensitive team communication, behavioral observations, or billing notes that should not be shared with the client.

Searching and Sorting Comments

Use the Search field to find comments by text content. Change the sort dropdown or toggle Ascending/Descending to reorder comments by date.

How Alerts Work During Appointment Booking

When you create or edit an appointment and select a client or patient that has alerts, a yellow ATTENTION box appears in the top-right of the appointment modal. This box shows alerts from both the client record and the patient record, giving the person booking the appointment immediate awareness of any special considerations.

This means your front desk staff sees “Aggressive” or “Owner difficult to reach” before they schedule the visit.

How alerts work on the Status Board

The Status Board includes an Alerts column for each patient currently in the clinic. Staff can view existing alerts or click + Add Alert directly from the board without opening the full patient profile. This is useful during busy shifts when you need to flag something quickly.

What to do if something goes wrong?

 You added an alert but it doesn’t appear on the appointment booking modal. Alerts on the booking modal come from both the patient and the client. Confirm you added the alert to the correct record (patient, not client, or vice versa). Also confirm the booking modal is selecting the correct patient.

The ATTENTION box on the Owners tab is empty or missing. The box only appears when at least one alert, diet, or note exists. If you just removed the last entry, the box disappears automatically.

Internal Staff Comment won’t save. Check that your text is confirmed (click the green checkmark). Also verify that any attached file is under 500kb and in a supported format.

You need to edit an existing alert or diet. Alerts and diets cannot be edited in place. Remove the existing tag (click X) and add a new one with the corrected text.

A file attachment on a comment fails to upload. Confirm the file is one of the supported formats (JPG, RAW, PNG, GIF, JPEG, PDF, ODT, PPT, PPTX, DOC, DOCX, CSV, XLS, XLSX) and does not exceed 500kb.

Note: Contact the viggoVet help if any of these problems persist after following the instructions.