Schedule, directory and patient service

Three screens that make the front desk's day work. Directory is the catalog of organizations, practitioners and services that feeds the schedule. Schedule generates slots, books appointments with a lock against overbooking, handles telehealth and keeps the waitlist. Service records requests, complaints and ombudsman cases with an SLA, escalation and NPS.

The three screens sit in the Health menu, as Schedule, Directory and Service and ombudsman. The natural order of use is the reverse of the menu order: first you build the Directory, then you open the Schedule, and Service follows up afterwards.

Directory: the catalog that holds up the schedule

The Directory has three tabs. Under Organizations you register the Name, the Kind, for example hospital, clinic or laboratory, and the City. Under Practitioners you register the Name, the Council and the Registration. Under Services you register the Name and the Category, which is what the patient books, for example Dermatology consultation.

Register all of this first: the schedule points at real practitioners and real services. Everything here is administrative data about the institution, with no patient information.

Schedule: generating slots and booking

1. Open Schedule and select the Patient in the selector at the top. With no patient selected, the system tells you before letting you book.
2. In the Generate slots block, enter the Date, From, To and Duration (min), then click Generate.
3. The system tells you how many slots were created and they appear under Free slots.
4. Click Book on the slot you want. Tick Telehealth and paste the Video link if the appointment is remote.
5. The appointment now appears under Patient appointments.

Booking is locked on the server. If two people at the front desk click the same slot at the same time, only one booking goes through. There is no silent overbooking.

Under Patient appointments you follow When, Mode and status, and you act: Confirm, Complete or Cancel appointment. Marking an appointment as completed or as a no-show matters more than it seems, because that history is what feeds the no-show risk indicator.

Telehealth

Telehealth works by link. You mark the appointment as remote and enter the address of the video room your practice already uses. The CRM does not host the call: it keeps the link with the appointment and delivers it to the patient in the portal, which avoids the lost email with the room address.

Waitlist and no-show risk

When there is no slot to offer, use Join waitlist to put the patient on the Waitlist with a Priority. When a slot frees up, click Fill from waitlist on that slot: the system books the first compatible person in the queue, respecting priority, in a single operation that never drops two people into the same slot. If nobody is compatible, it says so instead of booking just anyone.

No-show risk is calculated from the patient's own attendance history: how many appointments they completed, how many they missed and how many they cancelled. It is a deterministic calculation with no clinical information: the same history always produces the same result. Use it to decide who deserves an extra reminder and who should not be given the last slot of the day.

Service and ombudsman

The Service and ombudsman screen records what the patient asks for or complains about after, or before, the appointment. At the top there are four indicators: Total, Open, Overdue and NPS.

1. Under New request, write the Subject.
2. Choose the Category from Request, Complaint, Ombudsman, Information, Appeal and Compliment.
3. Choose the Priority from Low, Normal, High and Urgent.
4. Click Open.
5. Use Advance to move the case between Open, In progress, Pending, Resolved and Closed. The screen only offers the destinations that are valid from the current state.
6. Use Escalate when the case has to go up a level, and NPS to record the patient's score from 0 to 10.

Every case has an SLA clock, and the ones that blow through it are flagged as Overdue and counted in the Overdue indicator. Like the rest of the vertical, the content is administrative: the Subject field describes the request, not the patient's condition.

Common questions

• Does generating slots twice over the same interval duplicate them? Generate per interval and check the Free slots list before repeating the operation.
• Can a service state be skipped? The screen only offers valid transitions. A Closed case, for example, only goes back to In progress.
• Can I book without choosing a patient? No. The screen asks you to select a patient first, because an appointment belongs to somebody.
• Does the CRM run the video call? No. It stores and delivers the link for the video tool your practice already uses.

Open this article inside the system →