Accurx’s Self-Book feature is super user-friendly and adaptable, giving you the most flexibility when it comes to appointment slot types. There’s no login necessary for patients, meaning it’s quick and easy for them to book in. It also works really well with other Accurx features used by primary care organisations, including Floreys and appointment reminders.

When sending a Self-Book invitation to your patients, you'll be able to specify one or more clinicians that you would like the patient to book an appointment with. If you use this option, the patient will only be able to view appointments available for the clinician(s) of your choice.

You can find out more about this feature in this article.

If you have your appointment slots already set up, all you need to do is select your preferred slot type from the list and your patients will be able to book directly into your clinical appointment book. You’ll just need to ensure that you have some available slots for the next six weeks.

Organisations in Wales and Northern Ireland can use our Booking Module if they use EMIS. Please contact us if you’d like to find out more about using the Booking Module in Wales or Northern Ireland. Unfortunately, we don’t currently integrate with Vision.

At the moment, Self-Book appointments won’t go towards online booking targets. Accurx continues to work with NHS England on how this might work in the future.

We have created some short user guides on how to set up new slot types in EMIS and SystmOne. Please click one to find out how to do this for your relevant clinical system! ☝️

As standard, we search your appointment book for new slots or new appointments once every 24 hours. Once you've sent the batch message we'll start checking your appointment book at 30-minute intervals for 7 days while the links are still valid, once the links expire or are fully booked we will go back to searching the appointment book once every 24 hours! If you need it sooner than 24 hours, the Support team can help you, just ask for a manual refresh of the dates you need.

No, sadly the ability to schedule the date and time of when we send Self-Book links isn’t available at the moment.

The booking links sent to patients will expire after 7 days.

You can currently show appointment availability up to six weeks in advance. We know that some organisations would prefer less/more than this, and we’re looking into whether we can amend this. We find that six weeks is the optimal time to encourage appointment bookings while keeping DNAs to a minimum.

We have introduced a 12-week window trial for the Flu season, if you'd like this enabled for your organisations please get in touch with us on Support using the chat bubble in the bottom right corner.

The Booking Module features currently don’t support hub-style working. This is something we are looking to support in the near future. Watch this space 👀

Yes, appointment availability can be restricted to a certain time period! If you embargo the appointments for that time period, they won’t appear as available to your patients. Appointment slots will only show through the Self-Book link once you mark them as available in your clinical system.

Yes, you can invite patients for a combined appointment! You just need to set up an appointment slot type for a joint COVID-19 and flu vaccination.

Yes, you can upload a list of patients to book into a specific appointment slot type! You can do this using our Batch Self-Book feature. This works a lot like accuBook for COVID-19 vaccination clinics, except it integrates with your clinical appointment book and can be used for any appointment type.

At the moment, you can only offer one appointment slot type per Self-Book link.

Yes, you can use Self-Book for appointments other than flu vaccinations! This functionality was built to support vaccination programmes, but it’s super flexible and can be used for other things too. The only thing to bear in mind is that the SMS costs for these use cases would need to be covered by your organisation, local Federation or ICB. This includes those wanting to use it for Polio vaccinations this year.

You can use your existing SMS templates, or make new ones, for individual Self-Book messages. This also means you can add a Snomed code to these texts. For Batch Self-Book, we will provide some Accurx recommended templates, which will include messages for flu, polio and COVID-19 vaccination appointments.

Yes, we now support booking appointments on the same day with Self-Book.

If you send out a Self-Book link on the weekend, the message will be sent straight away. We don't support scheduling or any delay in messages for Self-Book links, despite being sent in out of hours or not.

Unfortunately, you are unable to cancel a Self-Book link you have sent. However, if you open the link and input the date of birth wrong 15 times then this will disable the link. We also would recommend messaging the patient to let them know the link is now invalid.

If this was a batch Self-Book you've sent out you can get in touch with Support using the chat bubble icon in the bottom right corner and we can revoke this for you.

Yes, patients will receive appointment reminders as long as you have the slot type set up in the appointment reminder settings for the Self-Book slot type they booked into.

Our Self-Book links are currently set to a maximum of two SMS fragments.

You can see which booking links were not used or expired in your 'sent' folder in the inbox. This may look different in Batch Self-Book, and we’ll keep you updated on this.

The patients won't be able to cancel their appointment through the same link - but they can cancel it through an appointment reminder (if the organisation has appointment reminders set up for that slot type).

Yes! Patients will only be able to book into appointment slots that the organisation has chosen to show them. You will choose the specific appointment type before sending a booking link, for example, a COVID-19 booster appointment, or a smear test.

You will know if a patient has booked an appointment with Self-Book as there will be a status for the link in the message thread. For batch Self-Book you can also see this in the 'View Details' section of your Batch Message table.

Yes, patients will get a confirmation message with the date, time and location of the appointment.

Yes, when sending Self-book links out in Batch, you can choose whether you'd like patients to be able to decline their appointment invite.

If you choose to enable this, the patient will be able to decline via the link in their invite text message. If the patient does decline, a SNOMED code (chosen by you) will be automatically added to the patient's medical record. More info on this here.