The HotDoc Appointment Calendar is where you can see and control your upcoming appointments and availability, allowing HotDoc to know what times we should show as bookable online for your practice.

The Appointment Calendar allows you to easily view practitioner schedules as well as book, reschedule, and cancel patient appointments.

This guide will take you through how to use the Appointment Calendar to manage bookings for your practice. It also includes some handy links to resources you may want to refer to as you use HotDoc, as well as a training video you can have your staff view.

How does the Appointment Calendar work?

Watch this short video to gain a quick overview of how to use the HotDoc Appointment Calendar. The video goes over most of the main points covered by the rest of this article. 

The HotDoc Appointment Calendar is an appointment book view that shows your practitioner's sessions, accepted online bookings, as well as any manually created appointments. 

To access the Appointment Calendar, log in to your HotDoc Dashboard and navigate to Calendar:

On this page, you can view all successful online booked appointment requests, as well as any appointments you have manually entered yourself. Available appointment times are shown in green and these are the times that HotDoc will show as available online.

Some practices will use the HotDoc Appointment Calendar as their main appointment book while others will manage availability by regularly updating the HotDoc calendar with appointments created in their clinical software. 

Features of the HotDoc Appointment Calendar

• Anyone with a Clinic User Account that has access the Dashboard can log in to view this appointment book. It is recommended that you create individual users for each person who may need access to the calendar. See How to create, edit or delete a Clinic User to learn more.
  
  
• View your online booking history, including the ability to filter through the criteria to maximise your search results. 
  
  
• Practitioner sessions or schedules are populated using the settings in each practitioner's HotDoc profile. To adjust this, see our guide on editing availability settings.
  
  
• Hiding sessions is the quickest way to make recurring times unavailable for practitioners. Practices use it to mark off regular breaks or walk in sessions. To hide a session, see How to hide a session. To make a single appointment time unavailable directly from the Calendar, view How to remove or hide an available time in the HotDoc Calendar?
  
  
• Available appointment times are shown in green, while booked appointments will be shown in various colours depending on their arrival status. You can learn more about this  in Managing arrival statuses
  
  
• Toggle between Day and Week view by selecting the option above the calendar.
  
  • In day view, select a specific practitioner's name on the Calendar to see their week view 
    
  • In Week view, toggle between practitioners by selecting Edit next to the practitioners name:
    
    

    Day view, Click to enlarge

    Week view, Click to enlarge

    
    
• Skip 1 week, 1 month or 6 months in the Calendar to reschedule or rebook appointments using the navigation buttons:
  
  
  
• The Calendar icon allows you to navigate to a date in the future or past. Click this icon, filter by months or years, and select a date. 
  
  
  
  
• Right click on an appointment to perform the following actions:
  

  Change patient arrival status  Confirm reminder (if an appointment reminder has been sent) Reschedule appointment  Cancel appointment  Book next appointment  View appointment history

• Clicking Settings on the top right corner will allow you to:
  • 1. Sort the order of practitioners in the calendar by clicking their name and dragging. The top corresponds to the left, and bottom corresponds to the right.
  • 2. Hide practitioners from appearing in the Calendar by unchecking the box. 
  • 3. Print Calendar to get a print out of your day
  • 4. Zoom in or out using the - and + buttons
  • 5. Add and edit icons - See How to add icons to an appointment in the Calendar for more information on how to do this.
     
    
    
• Search for patients' appointments with their name or mobile/home phone number using the Search appointments field:
  
  
  
  
• Patient consent and communication can be also managed from the Appointment Calendar, which includes options to send HotDoc communications such as appointment reminders, or to send a new patient form. For more information you can see How to edit patient details or consent preferences.

Managing arrival statuses

You may wish to manage arrival statuses within the Appointment Calendar so that practitioners or other users of the HotDoc Dashboard can easily see where in the appointment journey a patient is at. 

1. To change the arrival status of a patient, firstly select the appointment:
   
   
   
   
2. In the Appointment module, select the status drop down menu and click on the arrival status you wish to move the appointment into. Then select Done:
   
   
   
   
3. You can also change the status by right-clicking on the appointment. This will show you the option to Change status and if you hover your mouse on it, you will be shown a list from which you can then select the status you wish to move your appointment into:
   
   
   
   

The appointment tile will change colour according to the new status, of which a key is available at the bottom of the Calendar view:

Patient Consent for Reminders and Forms

Patient details that are entered into the HotDoc Appointment Calendar are saved to your practice's HotDoc Patient database.

• To learn how to send reminders to a patient, see How to send an Appointment Reminder with the HotDoc Appointment Calendar
• To learn how to send a form request to a patient, see How to send a HotDoc Form request to a patient
• To learn how to manage patient consent preferences, see   How to edit patient details or consent preferences

Additional articles for appointment management in the Calendar

The following articles explain how you can manage appointments with the HotDoc Calendar. Please click on each of the following links to see how to do the following:

• How can I add an appointment in the HotDoc Calendar?

• How to cancel, reschedule or edit an appointment in the HotDoc Calendar

• How to view a patient's appointment details in the HotDoc Calendar?

• How to remove or hide an available time in the HotDoc Calendar?

• How can I add notes to a patient's appointment in the HotDoc Calendar?

• How to add icons to an appointment in the Calendar

• How to add, edit, delete or manage Recalls in the HotDoc Calendar