You can prevent people from scheduling online too far in advance, like no more than 6 months from present time and
you can also limit patients from scheduling too soon from present time, such as within 1 hour from the present time, so you aren’t caught off guard.
This setting is for practitioners who want to allow existing patients to be able to book online. Currently, a patient who hasn’t had a confirmed appointment is considered new, but for all new people from the public, their requests for an appointment will first go into a “queue of pending appointments” and you or one of your staff will have to “confirm” or “deny” their request before their appointment is ‘official.’
This could be useful if you’d like to screen patients before they come to see you and please note that this setting is practitioner specific, so each practitioner can decide what is best for them.
If you need to, tweak what times patients can book online, whether it be on the hour, half hour, or 15 minutes.
Several features in the “smart scheduling” setting will help you out a great deal!
For example, the last setting has to do with appointments that overlap other appointments and whether or not you allow patients to book these online or if you only allow someone in the office to do so.
If you do allow online booking of these “concurrent appointments”, the top option will tell the software to encourage these appointments, and the 2nd option will discourage the overlapping appointments.
This handy setting will limit how many appointments are shown available to those who view your schedule online
and this setting will encourage patients to book next to other appointments so that you don’t have gaps in your schedule. When patients book online, they will see “green” appointment options that will be encouraged to be selected to help limit gaps.