Multi-location Appointment Search

(This is a sub-topic under Appointment Search)

Appointment search for a single Provider across multiple Locations

Practices with multiple Locations often have individual Providers conducting treatment in Rooms across those Locations.

Patients tend to book appointments with their personal Provider, so Receptionists from one location need to be able to offer patients alternative appointments for the same Provider in another location.

For example, a patient wants to book an appointment with her preferred Dentist at Location 1 for Saturday morning, but that Dentist only practices at Location 2 on Saturday mornings.

The multi-location Provider Appointment Search gives patients a full choice of appointment slots for their personal Provider, wherever that Provider may be working across the entire practice.

Multi-location capability maximises appointment bookings for the practice, which contributes revenue.

Requirements:

This full functionality applies only to practices that have

• EXACT version 12.11 or later.
• Multiple Locations configured
• Rooms configured in the different Locations.

Multi-location search with Rooms configured:

In this case the Locations are shown against Rooms, not against the Providers.

If you select Provider: Any Dentist and In Room: Any Room, you will then have multi-Location/Room options in the manual dropdown menu against the Book button:

Multi-location Search without Rooms configured:

In this case the Locations (LOC in this example) are shown against Providers, based on Preferred Location recorded in the Provider file.

Without Rooms configured, the multi-location Appointment Search historically could at best offer a list of appointments at Provider Preferred Locations.

However, from v12.11 there is an option to override the constraint of Provider- Preferred Location:

There are also ways to "hack" the Provider-Location constraint:

• Configuring Provider Preferred Locations as a spread across the Locations, and training patients to accept different Providers.
• Replicating multiple versions of the same Provider (Dave-A and Dave-B) and setting a different Preferred Location for each Provider-version.

To search across Locations for appointments with one Provider (Rooms configured)

Requires that Rooms have been made available for Multi-Location Appointment Search

Run an Appointment Search as normal (see Using the Appointment Search Window), but proceed as follows:

1. Select the Provider (in this example, Dentist RGP)
2. Select Any Room (because you want to locate appointment options for RGP across any Rooms, regardless of Location).
3. So long as RGP has been configured as practicing in Rooms across the Locations, you can then select a Room/Location for RGP, and view the appointment slot options from which to choose: