How your clinic is put together

Healthcare Platform holds one clinic. Everything you do in a day, booking a
patient, seeing who is free, writing a visit record, sits on top of a few
settings you enter once.

This article shows you the order those settings go in, and why each one needs
the one before it. Read it once before you start. It saves you from setting
something up twice.

Who can do this: the clinic admin. Reception and doctors do not need to set
any of this up, but it helps to know where Schedule gets its answers from.

You build the clinic from the outside in:

You cannot usefully skip a step. Each one is the thing the next one asks for.

Go to Clinic settings > General. Enter the clinic's legal details, then the
currency and time zone, then the booking defaults.

The time zone matters more than it looks. Every time in the system, every
appointment and every working hour, is shown in it.

What you should see: the clinic name in the bottom left corner of the screen,
under the menu.

Go to Clinic settings > Locations and add every place where a patient is
actually seen. One clinic can have several.

A location is not decoration. A booking always happens at a location, and a
staff member's hours are set per location. If a doctor works Monday in one
building and Tuesday in another, both need to exist here first.

What you should see: your locations listed, each one active.

Go to Departments and create the groups your services fall into.

Every service must belong to a department, so this comes before services. A
department also carries a colour, and that colour is what you will recognise in
Schedule later.

What you should see: each department with its colour, and no services in it
yet.

Go to Services and add what a patient can book: a consultation, an X-ray, a
vaccination. Each service needs a name, a department and a duration.

Two things to get right:

What you should see: your services listed with a department beside each one.

Go to Medical staff and add each person. Then make two connections, because
these are what Schedule reads:

Adding a person to the clinic does not by itself make them bookable. Until a
person is linked to a service, no patient can book that service with them.

A staff record is also separate from a login. Giving somebody a user account
and a role does not create a staff record, and only the staff record can have
hours and bookings (see Medical staff and users: what the difference is).

Two kinds of staff. Someone on a regular timetable is Fixed. Someone
who comes in when called, and has no standing timetable, is Flex. A flex
staff member with no hours is normal and is not a mistake to fix.

What you should see: the person in the list, with No schedule in the
Schedule column until the next step (By request for a Flex person), and the
services they provide on their profile.

On the staff member's profile, open the Schedule tab and add their hours:
which days, which times, which location.

Hours are kept as versions with a start date. When someone's timetable changes,
you do not overwrite the old one, you add a new version starting from the day
the change takes effect. The old hours stay, so last month's appointments still
make sense.

Absences are separate. Use the Out of office tab for holidays and days
away, not the Schedule tab.

What you should see: the current hours marked as active, and any future
version marked as upcoming.

This is the part worth understanding, because it explains almost every question
reception will ask.

You never create a free slot. Schedule works them out for you, from
four things at once:

Take any one of those away and the free times disappear. So when a slot you
expected is not there, you are not looking for a broken screen. You are
looking for the missing link: no hours that day, an absence, the service not
linked to that person, or the wrong location.

An appointment also occupies the person's time, not the service's. Once 10:00
is taken, it is taken for everything that person offers.

Once the setup above exists, the day runs like this:

The clinic can also be set up through a guided wizard, which walks the same
order as this article. The wizard is being finished, so a separate article will
cover it. If you set the clinic up by hand, the order above is the order the
wizard uses too.