Scheduling & booking
A functional overview of how scheduling works for staff. For definitions of the terms used here, see Core concepts.
How availability is defined
Roster rules define when a provider or other bookable resource is available. Staff (or clinic administrators) set these up so the system knows who or what can be booked, and when. Administrators can also set up a shared intake-nurse queue that referred patients book themselves, see Intake nurse availability.
Finding open slots
Given the roster rules in place, staff can query availability to see open slots: for a specific provider or resource, and for a given appointment type (the kind of appointment being booked, such as a particular visit type).
A slot is treated as taken whenever a booking already holds it, including a booking whose patient has already checked in, not only one still marked Scheduled. The assistant also never offers or commits a time that has already passed, so a slot cannot be taken up by a conversation that ran long.
Creating and cancelling bookings
Once you've found a slot, you create a booking: a reservation of that slot for an appointment type, against a resource. Bookings can also be cancelled, freeing the slot back up.
A time that has already passed cannot be offered or booked. A window drops off the slot list the moment it starts, and a booking whose start time is in the past is refused wherever it comes from: the patient portal, the assistant, or a coordinator booking by hand. A slot list left open on screen can go stale; acting on a stale one is refused rather than accepted.
Cancelling asks for confirmation first, because releasing the slot cannot be undone.
Changing an intake booking
When a patient asks the assistant to move a nurse intake call, the new time supersedes the original booking. The patient ends up with one appointment, not two. See Intake nurse availability.
Booking a nurse intake call does not grant consent to receive personal health information by text or phone. That consent is captured separately and explicitly, see Consent & patient privacy.
Appointments booked in your EMR
Where the real appointment is booked in your own EMR, it can be recorded here so the calendar and the intake funnel show what is actually happening. It's recorded from the prospect's record, beside Book appointment, not from the calendar itself; there is no "record" control on the appointment book.
Once recorded it appears on the calendar like any other appointment, but:
- It reserves nothing. A recorded appointment holds no slot and blocks no resource, so it can never reject a genuine booking for that physician or hide an availability window a patient could self-book.
- Nothing syncs. This is a record, not a link. If the appointment is moved or cancelled in your EMR, somebody has to reflect the change here, and an inbound patient reply about something else will never supersede it, because cancelling here would not move the real appointment.
- It says where it lives. Opening it on the calendar names it as recorded rather than booked, so nobody reads it as time the clinic is holding.
- It does not require the physician to have availability set up here. A physician whose schedule lives entirely in your EMR is exactly the case it exists for.
See Prospect management & outreach for how to record one.
Booking a prospect promotes them to a patient
When you book an appointment for a prospect, that action is what promotes them to an active patient. It's the single point where the outreach side of the funnel connects to the clinical record. See Referrals workflow for how a referral becomes a prospect in the first place, and how staff drive it through outreach up to the point of booking.