Configure Scheduling – OptiMantra Inc.

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In this Scheduling section, organize your organization-wide and practitioner-specific calendar settings and set up online booking

Org Settings
Practitioner Settings and Practitioner Schedule
Online Booking- with two options for opening time slots:
- Availability by Shift (recommended in most cases!)
- Availability by Week

In OptiMantra, please open Settings > Scheduling

> Org Settings

Here on the Org Settings page, you can set your organization-wide scheduling and calendar preferences, including:

Calendar set-up (how you view your calendar, slot durations),
Email reminder and policies (email reminders, calendar attachments, cancellation policies),
Practitioner order on the Scheduling page, and
Appointment status colors

This page is for your practice-wide calendar - email reminder options and shift management can be customized in upcoming sections

1. Set Calendar Settings

Decide on your practice-wide calendar settings, including
- Do you want Saturdays and Sundays to show on the calendar?
- When do you want the calendar to start and end?
- What time slots do you want to see?
- Set who can make adjustment to appointments - only administrators or any of your staff members?.

2. Decide on Scheduling in the Patient Portal (Please note this has been moved to the Settings > Communication > Patient Portal)

Decide whether you want to allow patients to schedule in the patient portal (select Hide Online Appointments if you want to disable self-scheduling)
Decide whether you want to allow cancellations through the patient portal and whether staff approval is needed

Make sure to save your new settings!

3. Order your Practitioners and Rooms

Select what order you want practitioners and rooms to appear on your Scheduler page

4. Pick Your Colors

Decide what colors you want to have associated with different types of appointments so you can assess your calendar with a quick glance
E.g., make 'cancelled' appointments red so they pop and your 'tentative' slots yellow so your office can confirm them
Colors will take affect based on the last change made on the appointment ex if the status is the last change, status color will take priority, if the service was the last updated item the service color will take priority.

For appointment colors, the priority order (from lowest to highest) is decided as follows:

Color of the practitioner (step 1)
If Color on the service is setup, then service color takes precedence
If a custom Color is set on the appointment, it is always displayed

> Practitioner Settings

Customize your practitioner-specific calendar settings for the Scheduling page (previous section provides practice-level options)

For appointment colors, the priority order (from lowest to highest) is decided as follows:

Color of the practitioner
If Color on the service is setup, then service color takes precedence
If a custom Color is set on the appointment, it is always displayed

You can decide on your calendar display preference directly on the Calendar page using the Save View Option; set your Calendar Display Preference to Weekly here

Daily Self View is a deprecated setting that is no longer supported. If need a specific view is desired, please review the Save View options here: Save a Scheduler fixed view
- The use of the "Daily Self View" can cause the schedule to not display correctly even after manual selections have been made
- The schedule to appear mismatched.
- Issues with moving between days or weeks.

You can add a Google calendar integration to cross-display your OptiMantra and Google calendars on each other. This can be added under the Settings > Scheduling > Provider Calendar. Please note this is currently only specific to your user and does not display for other user. If you would like to share with other users, we recommend connecting the Calendars in Google, which will allow you both to pull them into OptiMantra.

See our Google Calendar Article here: Connect your Google Calendar to OptiMantra

> Practitioner Schedule

Practitioner schedule is available under the practitioner settings tab.

Here, you can adjust your availability by practitioner and by location for every day of the week; block off your lunch hour too!

Please note the "Optional Fixed Schedule" is rigid and cannot be adjusted on individual days. If your schedule is more malleable, we recommend using recurring blocks on the calendar instead. This will allow yo u to adjust an individual occurrence.

> Online Booking

Please see this article for the most complete information on Online Booking: Configure and Troubleshoot Online Booking

In this Online Booking section, offer online appointment scheduling for your clients (if you'd like) by using OptiMantra Online Booking and set up your booking preferences and availabilities

>> Location Settings

On the Location Settings page

Set your Online Booking settings by location, including configuring the Scheduler appearance, deciding on text confirmations, and setting up online payments
Generate your custom Online Booking link to embed in your website, and
Preview Online Booking from here

Note that:

All of the settings here are by Location so you will be generating one booking link by location to embed in your calendar or emails - this helps reduce confusion ensuring patients know exactly where they are booking patients
Practitioners and their calendars can be open across locations - you've hopefully already set that up in the Practitioner Schedule section above

Adding Online Booking to Your Website

There are two ways to add online booking to your website:

Adding a button that opens up our scheduler
Embedding the scheduler directly into your website

Get the OptiMantra Code

For both of these, you will want to get a snippet of code from OptiMantra to add to your website

Go to Settings > Scheduling > Online Booking > Location Setting
Scroll down to the bottom of the page > Preview Online Booking

To add a button that opens up your online booking page, copy the Booking URL to Clipboard and add that as a link in a button icon on your website - here are some instructions on how to do that for the most common website providers:

SquareSpace - https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206543617-Embed-blocks#:~:text=Click%20Share%20or%20Embed%2C%20then,manually%20into%20the%20text%20field
Wordpress - https://wordpress.com/support/wordpress-editor/blocks/embed-block/
Wix - https://support.wix.com/en/article/embedding-custom-code-on-your-site
Using another service? Just search online for 'embed code' + 'name of your website service' for tailored instructions

To embed it directly in your website

You can also work directly with your website developer if you want to embed it directly into your website as an iframe (see example below)

This is a little more involved, so you may need technical help from your web design company, but here's a snippet of code that you can adapt for most sites and what that would look like below:

You then have two options to open up your schedule for online booking:

Availability by Shift (recommended in most cases)
Availability by Week

>> Availability by Shift (Recommended)

Use the 'by Shift' section to open your schedule for online booking to open a subset of recurring slots over time and open for irregular shifts

To set up your schedule, you can just click and drag to create a slot and then configure that time period - make sure you choose the services that are open for online booking and you can also set it to repeat if you'd like.

So, for example, if you had an irregular schedule, you could choose to offer all your in-person services every other Monday afternoon but open up telehealth appointments every Tuesday.

You can set your appointments to reschedule, open slots with breaks between and much more more.

>> Availability by Week (not recommended)

Use this 'Availability by Week' section to open your schedule for online booking if you have will always have availabilities over time; e.g., you want to open M, W, F from 9-12. You'll of course still be able to block off periods of time where you are unavailable on your calendar.

Only use this option if your schedule is always the same with no variation in openings.

> Save a scheduler fixed view (saving view filters)

This 2-minute video for an overview of how to apply Scheduler filters, and save (or clear!) your preferred Scheduler view.

Have more questions? Online Booking FAQs

Why are some services not showing up on my calendar?

If you're seeing that certain services are not showing up on your calendar, it's possible that you haven't selected them as showing up for online booking! Make sure you have them tagged for online booking under your Services setting AND selected them to show up for that booking slot under your booking calendar time slots.

If you use the Booking by Modality calendar link, you'll also need to make sure you've added the services to your modality groupings.

How do I make myself unavailable for specific dates?

To make yourself unavailable for specific dates, you can just create time blocks - an appointment on the schedule without selecting a patient - on your calendar. Time slots with appointments will automatically not be shown online.

To block recurring appointments, you can make the time blocks recurring (Daily, Weekly, Monthly). Here's a quick article on how to block your calendar.

How can I create buffer between services?

Under the Settings > Services > Edit section you can create Buffers between services.

For example, if you want 15 minutes to clean up after a massage, add a 15 minute block in the Service settings.

How do I overlap/stagger my patients?
Under the Settings > Services > Edit section you can create Buffers between services; buffers can be both positive and negative.

For example, if you want to stagger patients every 15 minutes, then you can change the Buffer above to -45 (so effectively your service is 15 minutes long for online booking purposes).

How do I set Email Templates by Service?
For online bookings, you can now pick different confirmation email templates for the different services. So, for example, if you want to send a different welcome email for office consultations vs. video chats, you can do that!
Settings > Services (Fee Schedule) > More Options > Assign Email Template To Service

Can I create private links to services?

If you're using the Modalities view of online booking, you can display just a subset of your services for online booking while making others (non-published on your Modality calendar).

To do this, please make sure

Services you want available online are marked as available online and have availability on your calendar - even if they are private services
Do not link any of those services to your Modality calendar! If you do not link a service to Modalities that service will not show up on the primary Modality online booking embedded on your website