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What is Self-Book for telephone appointments?
Self-Book for telephone appointments aims to save practices time by reducing the manual steps involved in booking patients into appointments.
Practices with Patient Triage can use Self-Book for telephone appointments. This means they can decide which Patient Triage requests need a routine telephone appointment 📞 and invite these patients to book in at a later date.
Invited patients receive a text message with a link they can click on to choose a time window that they are available. Once they have chosen, they are automatically booked into the appointment book! 🎉
To learn more about what Self-Book for telephone appointments is, and decide if you can use it at your practice, have a read 👉 here.
If you'd like to get started with using Self-Book at your practice, keep reading 👇
1. Deciding on a slot type
First, you need to decide which slot type you would like Patients to be able to book into for routine telephone appointments.
This can either be a slot type that you use in your appointment book for routine telephone appointments currently or you can create a new slot type. If you want to create a new slot type, you must add it into your appointment book sometime in the next 3 weeks before moving onto Step 2.
What slot types can I choose?
Self-Book can only be used for telephone appointments. This is because patients are given a time window for their appointment rather than a specific appointment time. Patients also can’t book appointments that are on the same day as they are sent an invite.
2. Setting up Self-Book (Telephone) for your chosen slot type
Once you have decided on a slot type for Self-Book, you need to set-up Self-Book to work with this slot type. To do this:
1. Click on the Accurx Inbox on the Accurx Desktop toolbar
2. Click on the “To Assign” folder on the left
3. Click on “Booking” underneath one of the Patient Triage requests. Note: it doesn’t matter which request you do this under as the patient won’t be sent anything
4. Follow the instructions that appear to set up Self-Book for chosen slot type
You will be able to select your chosen slot type (under step 2 above). You will only need to do this once for the practice.
Once you have completed the steps, you can slick “Start inviting patients” (step 4 above).
3. Inviting patients to book into Telephone appointments
Once Self-Book has been set up for your chosen slot type, anyone in the practice will be able to invite a patient to book a routine telephone appointment by clicking “Booking” and then “Send and save”.
What will patients see?
Patients will receive a text message with their unique booking link:
Once they click the link and enter their date of birth to confirm their identity, they can select a date and time window for their appointment. Once they have chosen, they will just need to confirm their booking.
Once a patient’s booking has been made in EMIS/SystmOne, they will receive a confirmation text message with the date of their appointment and time window:
You can get an overview of all booking links sent out by your practice and their booking status by looking at the Message Status page.
Got a question?
Find our FAQs page here 😄