Schedule and working hours
A week is entered once, not seven times
Working hours usually repeat across several days, so you enter them for several days at once. The exceptions - a closure, a shorter Friday, a break that came up - go in separately and leave the rule underneath alone.
What a week is made of
Four things, and only the first is compulsory.
An hours rule, across the weekdays you pick
You tick the days, give a range of hours and a visibility. "Copy to other days" does the same for the rest of the week. The week strip draws the result proportionally, so a shorter Friday looks shorter.
A break you can take back
A break is a row in a list rather than a hole left behind by some edit. Clicking it removes it - either by joining the two rules that bracket it, or by growing a neighbouring rule over it when there is nothing on one side.
A closure takes a date range
A holiday goes in as "from - to" rather than as seven separate exceptions. Those days are closed in the calendar and the booking page does not show them.
A buffer after a visit
Time for notes and for resetting the room, added to the service. A visit takes its own length plus the buffer in the calendar - which is why a service sometimes will not fit into hours that look long enough, and why the free-slot list says so plainly when it comes back empty.
The other calendar, the one outside this system
Nearly every practice has a second calendar - a personal one on the phone, or the one inside the records system. If the scheduler cannot see it, sooner or later it will book a patient into an hour that is already taken, and then you are keeping a paper calendar to protect the digital one.
Appointomat reads busy time from an external calendar over an ICS address and stores only the interval from it - not the title, not the attendees, not the description. That is enough to stop you being double-booked, and too little for anybody here to know where you were on Tuesday. Worth knowing: Medfile's own FAQ says its Google Calendar integration is deliberately one-way and does not pull private entries in - a reasonable decision, with the price that Medfile will not see such an entry.
Schedule and working hours
Questions
Can I move a visit by dragging it in the calendar?
Yes, on a desktop. A visit dragged somewhere else lands on the nearest real free slot for that practitioner on that day rather than on whatever pixel you dropped it at - and it can be dragged exactly when it can be rescheduled with the button, so that one does not do things the other forbids.
What about a patient already booked into an hour I am closing?
They stay booked. Changing working hours governs what can be booked, not what is already in the calendar - if you want to move somebody, you do that deliberately and separately.
Can a time zone break something for me?
Hours are always your practice's hours. You enter 9:00 and everybody - you, the patient, the reminder - sees 9:00, wherever they are and however their phone is set.
Get started
Start with your own week
Create an account, enter your working hours, and mark which of them a patient can see. The first ten practices pay nothing for six months.