How to Set Up Your Availability and How it Effects Your Patient Portal

Learn how to set up Service Staging and how it interacts with your Patient Portal availabilities.

When creating your schedule, appointment availability will show up based on four factors

1. The staging that is set up for the selected service
2. How many rooms are set up
3. How many patients you would like to see per hour
4. If you have appointment rounding turned ON in your Patient Portal Preferences

1. Allow for availability based on your staging

To allow the software to use the staging you set up within each of your clinic services for efficient appointment booking on your calendar, we recommend  turning off the "Round the  Appointment Booking Availabilities" toggle found in Patient Portal > Patient Portal Preferences. 

2. Set up your Staging in Clinic Services > Edit service

These lines are called "Stages".  The boxes highlighted in green are considered "busy" in the software.  In this example, the patient, practitioner and room are all highlighted and all considered "busy". This means that neither the room, nor the practitioner could be booked for the number of minutes indicated to the left of the line when a patient books an appointment. 

There are separate staging settings available for new patients and existing patients within each service.  To change who can book the service, use the dropdown menu titled "Service is provided to" and select "All", "New" or "Existing".  

Staging for a one room clinic

Here is an example of what your staging may look like if you have a one room clinic, or you only want to see one patient at a time:

Acupuncture service 90 minutes for New Patients, 60 minutes for existing patients.

The Service staging would look like this:

Here is what the Online Booking page will look like for NEW patient availability:

Here is what the Online Booking page will look like for EXISTING patient availability:

More frequent availabilities

If you would like your online scheduling to show an increased frequency of availabilities, add additional stages after the first stage to increase the length of the service for the room, patient and/or practitioner while keeping the first stage at the frequency with which you'd like the appointment to be offered. 

In this example, the staging is set to offer new or existing patients appointment slots every 30 minutes while the total time for the patient, practitioner and room is kept at 90 minutes for new patients and 60 minutes for existing patients. Bookings will be available every 30 minutes until an appointment is booked on the calendar which will bump the next availability to the end of the last stage.   

Shorter Service Length

To create shorter service lengths, change the time to 30 or 15 minutes and the schedule will reflect this change.

In this example, the service will be 30 minutes for New patients and 15 minutes for existing patients.

Add Breaks Between Appointments

You may want to have a break in between appointments to chart and clean the room. You can do this by adding another stage for yourself and the room so no one can book until both become available again. Here is an example of what this will look like: 

For a 2+ room clinic or staggered appointments

If you have 2 rooms or more, then you can create 2 stages in order to stagger your appointments This allows you to book and start an appointment while another is still in session (instead of only seeing one person at a time). This allows you to see 2 or more patients at a time, working between the rooms. Staging your appointments correctly will prevent double bookings and ensure that you can spend enough time with one patient before leaving the room to start another appointment. 

Here is an example of adding a second stage for a service:

This staging will allow you 60 minutes with NEW patients and 30 minutes with EXISTING patients before another appointment availability can be booked. 

You can still add breaks by adding on a third stage with only the room booked.

Troubleshooting - My Patient Portal shows different availability then I have in my clinic:

If your online appointments are not showing up correctly, be sure to check that "My Daily Schedule" matches "Clinic Business Hours" in your Clinic Settings menu.  

Clinic Business Hours has no affect on what your patients see, rather it allows “what is possible”. By opening up your Clinic Business Hours, your intended Daily Schedule should match what you want to show up on your Online Booking page.