Plan Configurations Screen Setup

Customise plans and appointment times for individual Practitioners.

Procedure

  1. In the Practitioners > Setup screen for a Practitioner, click Plans.
    Example Plan Configuration window, showing customised availability for a practitioner
  2. In the Plan Configuration window, enter the Plan Start Date, and indicate the number of Weeks per Cycle. A plan in its basic form is a series of weeks in a cycle, for example, a four-week cycle. Where a practitioner has multiple plans, each plan follows the previous in a sequence for example, a four-week cycle, followed by a two-week cycle.
  3. Within the body of this window enter Start and Finish times for each day. Enter an Offset time for each day if desired. The offset time sets the start time of first time period displayed in the Appointment Book. If no offset time is specified, the default time is 9:00am.
    • Copy the settings for Monday to Friday, by clicking the Copy Mon-Fri button.
    • Clear a weekend by clicking the Clear > Weekend button.
    • Copy from the previous week by clicking on the Copy from Previous Week button.
  4. Enter the morning and afternoon sessions, by entering a location in the AM and PM Location fields.
  5. If a Practice has certain time slots allocated to each appointment type, enter each commencing time separated by a comma and space, for example, 9:00am, 10:00am, 11:00am. Do this for each day of the week in the cycle. If the same time slots are required, you can copy and paste timeslots from one day to another.
  6. Each type of appointment (per practitioner) can be represented by a different colour, displayed in the Appointment Book. For example, you could indicate that New appointments will be displayed in blue in a 9am, 10am, 11am, etc. time slot, whereas Review appointments will be red in a 9:20am, 10:20pm, 11:20pm, etc. time slot.
    Example appointment times defined for different appointment types
    This image shows how the preceding setup is displayed in the Appointment Book.
    Example Appointment Book schedule for a Practitioner's day, showing different appointment types in different colours
  7. Click OK to confirm settings for the current week. If a Week 2 is required, click back into Plans and repeat the above steps. Each new week is entered and confirmed separately.
  8. Repeat the above steps for each Practitioner.

Results

In the Appointment Book, appointments that can be booked for this Practitioner match the plans and appointment start times defined in the Plan Configuration window.