Appointment self booking can be used to invite an individual patient or group or patients to book into specific clinic slot at your practice.
Patients can book appointments up to 6 weeks in advance so you should make sure the issue they are booking an appointment for can safely wait that long. There is no expiry date on the link sent to patients to book an appointment.
Here's a 3 minute video of how it works:
Enabling Appointment Self Booking for SystmOne
Appointment self booking can be enabled from your feature settings page by your Patchs Admin user.
If it is not ticked already, you can enable appointment self booking by ticking the box.
After ticking the box (or if the box is already ticked) you should use the Update Clinics and Slots button to populate your Appointment Clinic and Slot types from SystmOne before sending any invites.
The Last Updated status next to the button will indicate when the Clinic and Slot types were last updated.
⚠️ Where slots are embargoed , SystmOne doesn't return them to Patchs, meaning they won't be visible for patients to book. ⚠️
⚠️ Patients may not be able to see available appointments if the clinic or slot have blank spaces at the end of their name. Make sure to remove any blank spaces! ⚠️
⚠️ If you change the name of a clinic type or slot type then you will need to re-send any links for this clinic/slot type as the old link may no longer work ⚠️
Enabling Appointment Self Booking for Emis
Appointment self booking can be enabled from your feature settings page by your Patchs Admin user.
Before enabling appointment appointment self booking you should follow the instructions for Setting up Partner API Integration
You can then then enable appointment booking by ticking the box.
After ticking the box you should use the Update Clinics and Slots button to populate your Appointment Clinic and Slot types from EMIS before sending any invites.
The Last Updated status next to the button will indicate when the Clinic and Slot types were last updated.
⚠️ If you change the name of a clinic type or slot type you will need to re-send any links for this clinic/slot type as the old link may no longer work ⚠️
Appointment self booking when responding to a patient request
When sending a message to patient from the request details page, choose Self book appointment.
Choose the clinic and/or slot you'd like the patient to book into then send the link.
Appointment self booking for single patients from the Patchs Toolbar
Select the 'message' button on the Patchs Toolbar to send a self book appointment link to the patient you have open in your clinical system.
Then choose Self book appointment.
Choose the clinic and/or slot you'd like the patient to book into, then send the link.
Appointment self booking for multiple patients in bulk
When creating a new bulk message choose Self book appointment.
Choose the clinic and/or slot you'd like the patients to book into, specify the message sending options and then send.
What patients see
Patients receive a message notification in the usual way with a link to book an appointment - either by SMS or email. They then follow the instructions in on-screen to book an appointment.
When confirmed, the patient appears in your clinical system's appointment book:
If you also have appointment reminders enabled, the patient will be reminded about their appointment 24 hours beforehand and can cancel their appointment if needed.
What happens if a booking error occurs?
If a patient runs into an issue while trying to book through a self-book invitation, the notification will appear in your "Self-book errors" inbox as shown below:
If a patient successfully completes a booking after a previous error, the confirmation message is sent to the "Completed" inbox: