Appointment request - Where to start?

Online appointment request at a glance

• 🔧 Two levels of configuration are required to enable this feature: enabling your clinic's online appointment request portal and configuring the online service(s) offered by your clinic.
  • Creating multiple services allows you to expose the types of appointments that patients can book to avoid receiving requests of all kinds.

• 🚦You can limit access to the appointment request form by applying access rules based on certain criteria. It is possible to apply one or more eligibility criteria that allow the patient to be able to complete the appointment request form. If no eligibility criteria are specified, anyone can complete the request form.
• 📢 The appointment request portal can be embedded on your website, social media or Google Business Page for easy access.
• 📬 Appointment requests are received in the Tasks module.
  • All appointment requests can be found in one place in a single inbox or you can use the concept of a task queues to create multiple inboxes.

• • When an appointment is assigned from the task, the task is automatically completed.
  • There is currently no automation in place for a refusal. The clinic must communicate with the patient either by sending them an SMS or email via the administrative center or by calling the patient to explain the refusal of the appointment request.

Steps to follow

Step 1: Analysis of your needs and planning

The online appointment request allows your clinic's patients to fill out a request at any time of the day, without knowing whether the clinic offers short, medium or long term availability slots. In addition, managing these requests requires setting up an internal process to handle them. For these reasons, it is important to carefully analyze your needs, understand the feature and plan the necessary steps before activating it.

Here are some aspects to consider in your analysis:

• What types of appointments can patients request? Do you want to offer your patients the ability to request all appointment types (one general service) or do you want to highlight the specific appointment types that can be requested online (multiple services setup)? If your team chooses to restrict requests by displaying the services or appointment types that are available on one page of your site, you could then add a button for each type for clarity, or choose to integrate a single button, which will lead patients to a dropdown to choose from.
• Would you like to limit access to appointment requests based on certain criteria e.g. only to patients with a family doctor, only to patients who do not yet have a file in your clinic, etc.?
• How do you plan to promote your appointment request portal? Even though the request portal is a web page accessible from a URL, it won’t be easily found from a Google search right off the bat. So your team needs to think about how they want to promote the portal to their customers.
  
  In order to facilitate access to this page for patients, it is strongly suggested that you integrate it into your website. We strongly recommend that the button to access this page be visible from each of the pages of your website. The accessibility of this page will have an impact on the number of requests received. It is also possible to integrate the link on your Google Business page, your social media pages, your appointment communications in Omnimed, in your newsletters, etc.

• How would you like to receive appointment requests in the Tasks module? Do you want all requests to go into a single inbox, or would you like them to go into multiple inboxes (e.g. one inbox per doctor, per department, per appointment type).
  
  Prerequisites: You need to create task queues and embed various buttons/links into your website to highlight these inboxes/request types.

Step 2: Set up your clinic's patient portal

Once you have your game plan in place, you can go to enable the appointment request portal. Your clinic’s patient portal allows you to customize the URL that will allow patients to access your appointment request portal, as well as the contact information that will appear to patients at the end of the process. From Patient portal management section, you can enable or disable your clinic’s request portal.

➡️ Activate patient portal - appointment requests, online appointments and patient forms

Step 3: Configure the appointment request service(s)

Once your portal is activated, a person with access to the administrator account in your institution will need to go there and configure the online services that you want to offer to patients. Creating the service allows you to define the rules for accessibility to the portal.

This is the step where you need to decide whether your patients have access to a generic request form (a service) or whether you want to direct their requests (a service to be selected from a list of several defined services). Creating multiple services allows you to expose the types of appointments for which patients can make an appointment in order to avoid receiving requests of all kinds. However, services are not linked to an activity. Thus, when processing the request, it is possible to choose the most appropriate activity for the appointment.

Without a configured service, patients will not be able to access the appointment request form, even if the online appointment request portal is activated.

➡️ Prise de rendez-vous et demande de rendez-vous en ligne - Configurer les services en ligne

Step 4: Embed the portal link on your website and promote it to your customers

To ensure you receive appointment requests, you need to share the portal with patients. To do this, retrieve the link(s) from the clinic’s admin account and embed it(them) on your website, Facebook page, or Google business profile. Make sure the link(s) are visible and easily accessible to the patient. Then spread the good news to your patients!

➡️ Online appointment request - Embed the portal on your website or retrieve the link to share with patients

5. Process online appointment requests

Once your portal is set up and available to patients, requests will start coming in and will need to be processed. Make sure you have an internal process in place and who is responsible for processing requests.

➡️ Appointment request - View and process a request