Help when dealing with appointment scheduling with Unify
Scheduling with Kolla Unify
Scheduling for a local business is often nuanced. There are many inputs that have to be considered when adding appointments to the schedule. Some of the inputs are available as data from the practice software, and some are not. This document is a reference to help you build your scheduling apps on Kolla.
Office Schedules
To be able to schedule appointments for an office, you need to know when the office is open. There are multiple resources in the practice management system that can have open hours assigned to them.
Office Hours
Many times the office hours are input by the office into the practice software. You can access these hours from the Meta/Load-schedule endpoint. You need to pass in the Resource ID for the office, which you can get from the Meta/List-resources endpoint.
Provider Hours
Often providers have hours input for them in the practice software as well. You can access these hours from the same endpoint as the office hours, Meta/Load-schedule, and passing in the resource ID of the provider.
Operatory Hours
This is less common, but also can be in the practice management software as well, and can also be accessed through the same endpoint, Meta/Load-schedule.
Notes About Load Schedule Data
When loading schedules for resources the data comes back with two main schedule properties (for practice software that support this feature): schedule and notes. The schedule property returns all open hour blocks from the practice schedule and the notes section includes any “block outs” put onto the schedule. Block outs are areas marked in the practice management system for many different reasons, but often for reserving time for certain types of procedures or other special appointments. We include any block outs marked as “open”. If a block out is marked as closed (example: blocking out time for lunch) we will include that in the normal schedule blocks.
Appointments
The other, more obvious, input is looking at the current appointment schedule to see when there are openings. This combined with resource hours above will allow you to get most of the information you need to add appointments to the schedule.
Other Things to Consider
- While office hours are often available from the practice software, many offices don’t use them and just know their open hours and follow them. For these offices you may need to ask them what their office/provider hours are so you can accommodate their scheduling preferences.
- Like above, there is often other internal tribal knowledge in the office that isn’t readily available in the practice software. An example is “we only schedule new patients on operatory 5”. These are the types of information you will want to ask the office when you onboard them or ask them to add to their software so you can sync them accordingly.