How to Set Appointment Lengths When Manually Publishing Availability Follow

How Calendar and Practice Admin work together.

If you don't have an integrated software, in order to publish availability you'll need to use the Healthengine Calendar page in your Practice Admin portal, and our Healthengine Sidebar tool can be used as an appointment notification system. This article will cover off the two different ways you can publish your availability.

Contents

• Publishing with a Singular Appointment Type Length
• Publishing with Different Appointment Type Lengths
• Important Information

It's always a good idea to have a look at the appointment types page of your Practice Admin portal before you start creating availability so that you can ensure you are publishing times that will work with your appointment types. Once you have the hang of it, you should find this feature user friendly, and convenient to control.

Publishing with a Singular Appointment Type Length

If you only have the one appointment type length, publishing your appointments just got even easier!

To publish this way, you'll first need to ensure that your practitioners are setup with appointment type/s in Practice Admin under Manage Practitioners -> Edit Appointment Types. In the following example, we are adding two 30 minute appointment types.

For a more detailed breakdown on editing your appointment types, see here. 

You would then publish your availability using the Calendar feature in Practice Admin, as shown below:

For a more detailed breakdown on publishing with Calendar, see here.

Please Note: Availability created in Sidebar will not appear in the Calendar page of 'Appointments setup' in your practice admin portal settings. 

Publishing with different appointment type lengths

Most practices tend to have different appointment types, with different lengths. If your practice offers a variety of appointment types at differing lengths, you'll want to publish you availability a little differently.

For different appointment type lengths, you will want to publish your slots in a length that all of your appointment type lengths are evenly divisible by. 

In this next example, there are 15, 30, and 45 minute appointment types. The largest number divisible by all of those is 15. This means that in order to get the best out of publishing via Calendar, you'll need to set your appointment slot length to 15.

As a general rule, this is usually the slot length in your own practice management software if using one that we don't integrate with. 

Important Information

The Healthengine online booking system has been carefully developed to ensure practices are getting the most out of Healthengine with the least amount of effort. When a patient goes through the booking form and selects the appointment type they want to book, the system will pick up the length of the patient's chosen appointment type, and remove the corresponding number of slots. 

Using the above example, the patient has selected 'Teeth Whitening'. This is 45 minute appointment, meaning the system will pickup 3 slots to remove.

You'll notice here that whilst it doesn't visually take up three 15  appointment slots, the appointment length has been entered at 45 minutes from 9:45am-10:30am. All other slots will show in 15 minutes still.

Please Note: If there are not enough slots available in a row at the patient's chosen time, the system will pick this up and provide the patient some new appointment time options where there is enough time available:

Likewise, the system won't publish any availability that is too short to be booked into according to your appointment types setup. This means that you don't need to worry about patients booking appointments where there is not enough time for a particular appointment type to take place. 

• For example, if you only have a 15 minute slot available on your Calendar, but all your appointment types are set to 30 & 45 minutes, then that 15 minute slot will not display online, and you'll never be left rushing your patients through an appointment. 

As the Calendar is web-based, it also doesn't require any access to your own server or network, so if the Internet in your practice happens to go down, you'll be able to log into you Practice Admin from any computer with internet available to continue managing your availability. You can even use the Calendar from your lap top at home!

If you have any questions, experience any issues or need assistance with troubleshooting, please reach out to our friendly Healthengine Support Team via phone, live chat or email support@healthengine.com.au.