This article provides a list of actions we recommend if your clinic has been impacted by sudden changes in resourcing or temporary closure, due to unforeseen circumstances.
For our recommendations on the holiday season, please see How to prepare your Practice for the holiday break.
What do I do with HotDoc if I am short staffed?
Maintaining HotDoc when you're short staffed may mean that you'll need to prioritise some actions over others. This section provides the bare minimum of what we recommend you should do with HotDoc, as well as tips on how to communicate to your patients during this time.
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If your usual HotDoc Champion or admin is not available to perform these actions, any team member can be up-skilled with our guided tutorials by signing in with a HotDoc user and password into HotDoc Academy. |
- Continue to process appointments and forms in your Sidebar
While you may be short staffed, the Sidebar will still require some maintenance where possible, specifically for booking requests and patient forms. To better manage your time, we recommend setting designated times of the day to check the Sidebar so you won't need to focus on it during other times:
- Check your HotDoc Results:
While Clinical Reminders can generally wait a day or two, Results are important to send out to patients so we recommend prioritising this task where possible. We still recommend having a designated team member check the HotDoc Dashboard once daily using the instructions below:
- Add an alert message on your Practice Profile:
It helps to let your patients know why you may not have the same availability, or why you might not be able to answer all phone calls at this time. We recommend updating your phone messages and using the instructions here to add an update to your practice profile for patients to see when they make an online booking:
- Send a Broadcast to let your patients know the doctor is sick/ isolating:
If you need to contact specific patients, we recommend using HotDoc broadcast to target that practitioner's upcoming appointments and sending a SMS. Under 'Templates' select the 'Doctor ill / Patient reschedule' template which has a pre-populated message that stays within 1 SMS credit.
See the link below for a simple step by step guide on how to do this:
What do I do with HotDoc if we need to suddenly close?
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If your clinic must close temporarily, we recommend you follow these five simple steps in your HotDoc Dashboard. If you aren't at the clinic, you can still use your user account email and password to log in at home |
The following information is also found in the article How to disable HotDoc due to a temporary closure:
- Turn off your online bookings so that patients can't book appointments online
- Turn off appointment reminders so that patients do not receive reminders for upcoming appointments
- Update the Alert Message on your Practice Profile to inform patients of your closure
- Send a Broadcast to contact patients that have an upcoming appointment, and let them know you're temporarily closed. You can use our target audience filtering option for this.
- What to do when you reopen (reactivating bookings, reminders and updating your alert message)
FAQs
All of our practitioners need to isolate at home, how do I turn on Telehealth appointments for them?
You can create a Telehealth appointment, enable this for all your practitioners, and enable 'Telehealth only' mode so that patients cannot book in-person consults. Please see How to create and manage Telehealth appointments for how to do this.
Only some of my practitioners need to isolate, how do I turn on Telehealth appointments only for them?
If only some of your practitioners are working remotely and require Telehealth appointments, you can adjust this in the individual practitioners appointment type settings with these 4 simple steps.
How do I turn on Telehealth Video appointments?
Please see Getting Started with Telehealth Video Consultations for how to do this.
How do I make Telehealth appointments available only for specific dates or times?
If you want your practitioners to perform Telehealth appointments for one part of the day and in person consults for other times, you can use the custom sessions feature within the Practitioner Setup section of the Dashboard. Please see How to customise your practitioner's sessions for how to do this.
How do I tell our patients that we've closed?
You can send a Broadcast SMS to patients to let them know your clinic is temporarily closed. We suggest using our "target audience" filtering option and use the "Appointment date range" field to send to patients with an upcoming appointment for the duration of your closure. Please see Creating a Broadcast SMS using a Patient ID .CSV or filtering.
How can I take payments online?
If you can't access your payment machine, you can enable our Payments feature. So that you can securely accept payments from the patients to automatically take payment, or to send payment requests. For customers using Best Practice, please see Getting Started with Payments.