| This feature is currently available for Best Practice customers only |
Practitioners can now limit their online bookings to only be available for their regular patients. This setting is customisable per practitioner and will automatically accept bookings from their own existing patients and reject bookings outside of this criteria.
For this setting, the definition of existing patients is based on “patients who were last seen by the practitioner in the last __ months." The number of months can be defined per practitioner in the Dashboard Settings.
Patients will be informed of these booking criteria in the booking flow if this is enabled for the practitioner.
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In this article |
How to enable a practitioner to only accept their own patients?
How are bookings automatically processed?
Once the patient has submitted their online booking, HotDoc will run a check on your Best Practice Software to see if the patient has had an appointment marked as in consult, at billing or seen in the specified timeframe defined in the practitioner settings:
This check will take seconds to run.
- Note: If your practice is on a shared Best Practice database it will be treated like one practice. Therefore, if a patient sees the practitioner at another location, it will count as having seen the practitioner.
Automatic Approval
If the patient meets the criteria to confirm they are an existing patient of the practitioner, after the check is complete, the appointment will be auto-approved if your practice settings allow.
The patient will receive a confirmation email:
| Confirmation email sent to patient |
Automatic Rejection
If the patient does not meet the criteria to confirm they are an existing patient of the practitioner, after the check is complete, the appointment will be auto-cancelled.
The patient will receive an email notification shortly after they request the appointment:
| Rejection email sent to patient |
Patient Matching in the Sidebar
If the booking goes to the sidebar (for example, because an exact patient match is not found) an alert message will show up to inform the receptionist that a check will be run the moment they confirm the patient file match.
Once the booking is confirmed, the patient will be sent a confirmation email:
| Warning Message | Confirm Patient | Confirmation Email |
The receptionist can also decide to reject the booking via the sidebar. If the booking is rejected, the patient will be sent a rejection email:
| Warning Message | Reject Booking | Notification Email |
Online Bookings - The patient journey
The following patient journey represents an existing patient booking with their usual practitioner and automatically being approved:
The following patient journey represents a patient booking with a practitioner who does not meet the 'existing patient' criteria and is automatically rejected:
How to view bookings that have been automatically rejected?
To view bookings that have not been accepted, please follow these steps: