This allows patients to request an advanced appointment at the practice. Please note this will not interact with your current appointment system so it is important to understand it before switching it on for your patients.
Firstly, log in to your Staff Home page and go to the “Appointment/Call Requests” option. At the top of this you will see a button called “Options” – click this. Within this you can set the option for the number of days ahead you would like to restrict patients to booking on e.g. if you set it to 4, the patient can only requests appointments from 4 days in the future. You can set the maximum and minimum values which restricts the timescale in which patients can make the request for. You can also enable/disable the option for patients to leave a comment. Simply tick/untick the comment option at the bottom of these settings.
Save your settings.
Now, when a patient visits the website they can go to the “request an appointment” option and this will allow the patient to request an appointment on a certain day, with a certain doctor, at a certain time. This DOES NOT mean the patient has booked the appointment, just that they have requested it.
You can view the requests within your Appointments Manager and action accordingly. If you approve the appointment request an email will be automatically sent to the patient with their confirmation details along with their time & date of appointment. If you do not approve the appointment the patient will also receive an email telling them this and asking them to contact the surgery for further information.
You can set which email address at the practice the appointment notification goes to. If you login to the website editor on the “contact details” page of your website you will see a section titled “Email Addresses”. Click on this to open it up. You will see an option for “Cancel Appointments”. Enter the email address you wish these notifications to be sent to in this box and click on “Save”. The appointment emails are now set to go to this email address.