Working across multiple locations

A practice with more than one site — a downtown clinic and an uptown clinic, say — needs each location to behave as its own place: its own rooms, its own stock, its own address on claims. Ona threads the location you set up through every part of the product. This article shows where it surfaces, so a multi-site practice knows what to check.

Locations are the anchor

Locations are defined under Settings → Locations (see Setting up your workspace), each with its address, phone, rooms, and — importantly for billing — its CMS-1500 service facility fields (Facility NPI Box 32a, Taxonomy Box 32b). That last part is why locations matter beyond logistics: the location identifies where care happened on a claim.

Once a location exists, it appears throughout:

On a visit

When you create a visit (see Creating a consultation / starting a visit), an in-person visit takes a Location — and you can narrow it to a specific room within that location. The location picker lists rooms nested under each site, so you can assign "Downtown Clinic → Room 111" rather than just the building.

This is what keeps two clinicians at different sites from being double-booked into the same room, and it's what puts the correct service-facility details on the resulting claim.

On the calendar

The calendar (see Setting up your calendar & availability) is per clinician, but a clinician who works across sites has one calendar spanning both. The visit's location tells you where each booking is. For a practice where practitioners rotate between sites, the location on each visit is how the front desk knows which building to expect the patient at.

In inventory

Inventory is held per location (see Managing inventory) — the location selector sits at the top of the Inventory page. Botox vials at the downtown clinic are counted separately from the uptown clinic, and stock can be transferred between them. This matters because consumption draws down the stock at the location where the procedure happened, so counts stay accurate per site only if visits carry the right location.

On claims

A claim inherits its place of service and service facility from the visit's location — the Facility NPI and taxonomy code you set on the location flow onto the CMS-1500. So a claim for care at the uptown clinic carries the uptown facility details, and one from downtown carries downtown's. Getting the location right on the visit is what makes this automatic; getting it wrong sends the wrong facility on the claim, a common rejection cause.

The thread to keep in mind

The single habit that keeps a multi-location practice tidy is setting the location (and room) correctly on every visit. That one field is what makes the calendar, the room booking, the stock draw-down, and the claim's service facility all line up. Everything downstream reads from it, so a visit with the wrong location quietly sends the wrong stock and the wrong claim details — and neither is obvious until you're reconciling.

If your practice adds a new site, the checklist is: create the location with its full address and CMS-1500 fields, add its rooms, seed its inventory, and make sure clinicians who work there know to select it when booking.