How CTAppointments Works with the Scheduler

Your Online Appointments web site is updated at frequent, regular intervals with your Scheduler's appointment and event information. This information is then applied together with your settings below to offer available appointment dates and times:

• Provider Availability's Visit Purpose, Availability Hours, and Availability Exceptions (which covers any provider events not logged in the Scheduler)
• Site and Settings' Scheduling Preferences

By default, the web site is configured to permit booking of only one appointment at any given opening in the schedule. Once an appointment is scheduled in a particular time slot, this appointment time will no longer be available for selection in your Online Appointments site unless the appointment governor is set to allow for more than one visit in a specific time slot.

NOTE:  When booking appointments online there may be very rare occasions when a time slot has been taken, and this information has not yet reached the Online Appointments site even though the appointment shows as available to the patient.

In these rare situations the email response to the patient following their request will notify them that their request is declined and they should re-book their appointment at a different time.

About the Appointment Governor

As a reminder, when office staff schedules appointments directly through the Front Desk or the Scheduler:

• There is no limit in the software as to how many appointments you can schedule for a given provider at a one time, so long as the Appointment Governor is not enabled

• When the Appointment Governor is enabled, you can have the Scheduler allow a limited number of additional appointments to be booked at one time for a given provider (beyond this limit a warning will be displayed)

The Online Appointments booking allowance is also dependent on whether the Appointment Governor is in use, as explained below.

Using CTAppointments While Using the Appointment Governor

When the Scheduler's Appointment Governor is controlling bookings, all of the Scheduler's Governor allowances are copied over to the Online Appointments site. Instead of just one booking being allowed online, that time slot will be bookable for as many times as the Appointment Governor specifies.

Where the default behavior for the web site is to allow only one appointment booking per time slot, when the Governor is set to allow at that time, say three bookings, the Online Appointments site will now allow three bookings at this same time.

NOTE:  Any increased limit will not be apparent to the patient. They will only see the time slots available at that moment; there is no indication online of how many appointments are bookable at that time slot.

Using CTAppointments While Not Using the Appointment Governor

With the Appointment Governor disabled, once an appointment is scheduled (either online, in the Scheduler, or in Front Desk) in a particular time slot, this appointment time will no longer be available for selection in your Online Appointments site.