In order for patients to book appointments, you will need to define the supported services types (Video, Clinic and Text Consultations) of healthcare providers, specify availability timings and the services they support during those timings.

Important Points to Remember when Setting up Timings

For Clinic Services:  If your organization has more than one Practice Location and the Provider supports services across more then one location, it is important to ensure that the timings at one Practice Location do not overlap with the Provider’s defined timings at other locations.

It is however perfectly fine if clinic services and video consultations are offering during the same timings because video consultations can be held from any location.  Providers can choose to interleave their clinic services and video consultations if they find that convenient.

For Video Consultations:  As telemedicine consultations generally do not depend on location, normally you should only have to define them to be associated with your main Practice Location, thus enabling patients from anywhere to consult with your providers irrespective of their location.

There might however be situations where you will want to associate different Providers with different Practice Locations. For instance if you are global telemedicine service specifically focused on certain countries or regions and prefer to have patients consult providers from their own regions.

Setting up Calendar Time Slot Setting for each Provider

While the duration of each service is defined when setting up a Service, the Calendar Slot Setting helps to define the possible start time at which new appointments can be booked for a service with the Provider.

The default Calendar Time Slot defined for all the new Healthcare Providers in your Virtual Practice can be defined in the Appointment Calendar Settings.

If you would like to set different time slots for specific Healthcare Providers, then navigate to the particular Provider’s Account Settings.

Please note, appointments can only be booked at the start of a calendar time slot, not in the between.

Setting up a Provider’s Timings

Go to Settings → Team Users  and select the Provider for whom timings are to be set up.  And then choose to edit their Consultation Service Timings, per applicable Practice Location.

Multiple time slots can be added per day, taking into account breaks in between e.g. 9am-1pm, 2pm-5pm etc.  Click the ‘Add button’ to add a new slot. 

• Start Time and End Time: Timing duration of the slot
• Services: Choose one or more services that the Provider offers during this time slot.
• Applicable Date Range: Normally timings are specified as being applicable indefinitely. If however the Provider supports these timings only within a specific date range (e.g. the Provider might only be available for the next 2 months), that can be specified by specifying the dates.

Once you have set up a Provider’s timings and also the services offered during those timings, take a moment to check how this is displayed in the Provider’s profile page. Patients will then be able to view this information and book these services during the specified timings.  Also the Provider and administrative users will be able to schedule appointments for patients, as per these settings from the Portal Manager.

Also see:

• Set up Clinic Services
• Set up Video Services