Set Your Calendar Availability
Clinicians will want the calendar to display their designated days, times and locations for appointment availability. Follow the steps below to set availability which will be displayed on the practice calendar and in the portal for client appointment requests.
1. Getting started
Click the Profile Icon in the header of TherapyZen to navigate to your staff record or navigate to the clinician's profile whos availability you'd like to setup.
2. Setup your availability calendar
The Availability Tab always loads first on a clinician profle. This tab is where you'll setup your calendar availability.
3. Set your availabilty forecasting
If you plan on allowing your clients to schedule appointments in the portal, use this widget to set how far in advance a client can schedule. The maximum allowable value is 8 weeks in advance.
4. The availabilty calendar
The availability calendar always starts and ends with the business hours you designated in Settings. Start by double-clicking on a day that you'd like to make yourself available for appointments. (The blue shading signifies the current day of the week)
5. Setting up your basic availability
Fill out the top section of the New Availability form completely to create an availability block that will display on the internal scheduling calendar.
5a. Make your availability repeat weekly, bi-weekly or monthly. Also set an end to your recurring availability.
Great job! You've completed the first stage of setting up your availability. The timeslot you've setup thus far is only seen internally on your appointment calendar. Your appointment calendar will now look like this.
The green shaded area is provided to give you a quick visual reference of your available appointment times. This comes in handy when you've got a client on the phone and you're trying to find an available appointment slot. Once you schedule an appointment in your availability slot, it will look something like this:
The green shaded area now shows you which times you still have available that day. If you have a designated administrator or scheduler in your practice, they will be able to easily see when you've marked yourself as available when trying to schedule appointments for you.
Extending your availability to the client portal so clients can request appointments online
Now that you've setup your availability internally, you can now extend that availbility to the client portal. This lets your clients using the portal see when you are available for specific services and request those times.
1. Show your availability in the client portal
For this setup, you'll be using the bottom half of the same availability form you used in the section above. While editing our availability, click the Add Client Portal Availability button to enter your availability details. Here are the detailed settings of your portal availability:
- Service Type: Select the service that you'd like to make available for clients in the portal. These come straight from the service types area of Settings. Each service will have a 'client friendly' description that appears in the portal instead of the clinical definition. To learn more about setting up service types, visit this article on Service Types.
- Start and End Times: Set the start and end times for this availability slot. You can mimic your business hours or change the hours for this service specifically. Perhaps you might want to give yourself a break in the middle of the day to get lunch.
- Appointments Begin: Use this setting to determine if you want your appointments to begin on the hour, on the half-hour, the quarter-hour, back to back, or with a custom buffer in-between.
- Available To: You can designate what type of clients can see this availability slot. Existing clients are clients who already have a portal account and have been to their initial consultation or first appointment. New Clients are clients that will be visiting your portal for the first time. They don't have an account yet, but want to schedule their initial consulatation. Existing and New will show this availability slot to both sets of clients using the portal.
Add more availabilty slots for specific services you'd like to offer on the day you are configuring. For example, you may want to do new client consultations in the morning and do regular therapy sessions in the afternoon.
2. Complete the rest of your week.
Once saved, your availability will now show up as a block of time on the personal availability calendar. To edit your availability block, just double click inside the block to display the availability form again. Move on to the remaining days of the week and repeat this process until your availability is set for the entire week.
