New in AltoSignal 4.0
Version 4.0 draws your rooms as a floor plan and puts every patient and every staff member in them. Take a number at the front desk, drag the patient into an operatory, watch their clock and their state, and read their whole visit back afterwards. The board you already use is still one tap away.
Every screen and clip below is a real capture from one morning in a demo dental office: a Fire HD 10 on the wall of Op 1 beside the desktop app at the front desk, the same app on Windows, Mac and Linux. Nothing is a mockup and nothing is sped up. Two Button Setup shots at the end come from an eye care account. 4.0 is live on every platform: the browser app, the Mac and Linux downloads, the App Store, Google Play, the Amazon Appstore and the Microsoft Store.
One screen, five ways to see the practice. The toggle at the top left switches between Classic, Floor plan, List, History and Cards. Each screen remembers its own choice, so the wall tablet can live on the plan while the front desk keeps the classic buttons. The old Live button is gone: what it opened is now the History view.
01 · Classic
Classic is the same three-column board: who, what, where, then Send. Every button, channel and quick reply you set up is kept. The only visible change is that Dismiss and the corner close are gone, and Clear does what they did.
Every other view is built on the same buttons. Your Where buttons are the rooms on the plan and the rows in the list. Your Who buttons are the people you can place in them.
02 · Take a number
Press Next number and the next patient appears in your waiting area, Waiting, with a clock running. Add a short label such as initials if you want one. AltoSignal stores nothing else about the patient: no name, no chart, no reason for the visit.
To seat them, drag the icon into an operatory, or press Move to on the list and pick the room. Check out ends the visit. Every screen on the account sees the move the same second.
Next number: 3 · New day · Locate
03 · The hygiene hand-off
The hygiene room sends Maria RDH, Doctor Check, Hygiene 1. On the plan, Hygiene 1 glows and the banner names it. The doctor's screen answers Be There Soon from the quick replies, and the reply lands back in the hygiene room with an Acknowledge button beside it.
Acknowledge confirms on the server and clears the reply on every screen. The whole exchange is logged in the History view with who answered and when.
04 · States and timers
Waiting and With staff set themselves: a patient in the waiting area is Waiting, and a patient in a room with a staff member is With staff. The rest are one tap in the pane. Ready to leave stays until you change it.
A state can carry a timer. Numbing counts down eight minutes on the patient's pill, and when it runs out the icon turns the same red as the emergency button and ripples from the center, on every screen. Nobody has to remember to check.
05 · History
Tap any patient and the pane lists their day: when they checked in, every room with the time they entered and left, every state change, and the clock still running on the current room.
Staff have the same timeline, and so does every room: who is here now, and who was here today, with times.
06 · Staff on the plan, and the room's own pane
Every Who button is a person on the plan. Drag Dr. Patel into Op 1 and the icon moves, the room's count changes, and the patient in that room becomes With staff. Each person has a status from your People list.
Tap a room and its pane opens with the call ready to compose: the room is filled in, so a page needs only who and what. The same pane sets the room's state and lists who was in it today.
07 · Front desk to one room
From a room's pane the desk sends Dr. Kim, Phone Call, and the room fills itself in. The banner names the room on every screen that listens, and the room glows on the plan, so the other operatories can tell at a glance it is not for them.
With a room channel the other screens stay dark entirely. Channels work exactly as before.
08 · Locate
Press Locate and pick a staff member or a patient. On the plan, their icon glows and the bar says where they are. On the list, the row scrolls into view and its border glows red until you clear it.
It answers the question that used to send someone down the hall: where is the doctor right now, and which room did patient 4 go to.
09 · List view
On a tablet with twelve rooms, dragging small icons is fiddly. The List view is the same board as text: every room is a row with its state, its age and a count of who is inside, and the people under it with their state and their running clock.
Everything the plan does by drag and drop is a word here. State, Call, Move to and Check out sit on the row. A timer that ran out turns the row red. New day, Locate and Next number are in the same bar.
10 · Cards and History
Cards shows one card per room, full height: the state, how long it has been that way, and who is in it. Tap a card to set the state. A room with a patient carries their clock.
History is the signal board from earlier versions, now a view of the main screen: every page sent on the account, who sent it, and who acknowledged it, with Hide Acknowledged to keep only the open ones.
11 · Emergency
The emergency channel is unchanged: the red cross in the corner of every view opens the emergency buttons, one tap sends, and every screen on the account turns red until someone acknowledges. The buttons are yours to word; this office uses Call 911, Medical Emergency and Police Requested.
12 · Floor design
Auto layout builds a first plan from your Where buttons: rooms wall to wall around a hallway, with the Lobby as the waiting area. Then unlock Floor design and make it yours: drag a room, push a wall, move or add doors, mark the waiting area, name the hallway, pick the icon colors.
Rooms cannot be moved by accident. The plan stays locked in daily use, and design mode will be limited to the roles you choose once user roles ship.
13 · New day
New day clears every patient and their history on every device and sets the next number back to 1. It tells you how many patients are still on the list before you confirm, and staff stay where they are.
Nothing about the day's signals is touched. The History view keeps them.
14 · Button Setup
Under Status buttons, your account has three lists. Rooms holds the states a room can be in. People holds the states a staff member can be in. Patients holds the states a patient can be in, and any of them can carry a timer, so Numbing can count eight minutes while Waiting simply counts up.
Every Who button is assigned to a list, every delete asks first, and Reset lists restores a preset for your kind of practice in one tap if a list has grown messy.
A one-doctor optometry office on the same app: Pretest, three exam lanes, Special Testing, the Contact Lens Room and Optical. The clock that matters there is dilation, so Dilating carries a 20 minute timer. The eye care page has the whole morning, clip by clip.
The plan does not replace the page. It answers the questions people used to page about.
Locate, or a glance at the plan. The doctor's icon is in an operatory or it is not, and the room says how long.
The patient's clock is on their pill, on the room's card and in the list. Set a timer on a state and the screen turns red when it runs out.
Every patient's rooms and times, every room's patients, and every signal with who acknowledged it, without anyone writing it down.
On the Floor plan or List view, press Next number. The patient appears in your waiting area as the next number, Waiting, with a clock running. Tap the patient to add a short label such as initials if you want one. Nothing about the patient is stored except the number, the label you typed, the rooms and the times.
On the Floor plan, drag the patient into the room. On the List, press Move to on the patient's row and pick the room. Either way every screen on the account sees the move, the room's count changes, and the patient's history records the room and the time. Check out ends the visit.
In Setup, on the Rooms & staff tab, under Status buttons. Your account has three lists: Rooms, People and Patients. Each state in the Patients list can carry a timer, and a state with a timer counts down on the patient's pill and turns red when it runs out. Reset lists offers a preset for your kind of practice if a list gets messy.
It clears every patient and their history on every device on the account and sets the next number back to 1. Staff stay where they are. It asks for confirmation first and cannot be undone. Once user roles ship, New day will be limited to the roles you choose.
It became a view. The board that used to open from the Live button is now the History view in the toggle at the top left of the main screen, beside Classic, Floor plan, List and Cards. Nothing was removed, and the toggle remembers your choice per device.
Yes, per screen or for the whole practice, and the reason the switch exists is a story we heard from the IT manager of a 26-location eye care group. The paging system he had inherited flooded the office network with multicast traffic and knocked out the VoIP phones he had just installed; he moved it to its own VLAN and the traffic still leaked. The local path is a small discovery beacon and direct encrypted connections on one port, so there is nothing to flood. When a network policy wants none of it, two switches on the Account screen turn it off: for one screen, or for every device on the account. Pages still arrive over the internet either way.
Auto layout builds the first plan from the rooms you already have. Thirty days free on every screen, cancel anytime.
Start 30-day free trialAlready a customer? Update your screens to 4.1, or follow one morning on the classic board.
