5 Steps to Create a Patient Appointment Scheduling System
Patient scheduling is critical for your revenue because it directly influences clients in your practice management. In the past, it was done primarily through phone calls.
Today, however, you can integrate multiple automation options and turn time-consuming patient scheduling into patient self-scheduling.
A patient appointment scheduling system can improve client satisfaction, your revenue, and the staff efficiency of your medical office. We are sure you already know about these benefits, that’s why your next step is choosing the right software and optimizing it for the workload of your clinic.
For our tutorial, we’ll be using BookingPress, a modern doctor appointment scheduling system for the WordPress platform.
BookingPress offers you a set of tools to manage appointment scheduling, staff and their schedule, payment options, and communication via automated emails and SMS. Whether you’re a solo practitioner or a bustling multi-staff operation, BookingPress has enough tools to simplify your day-to-day workflow.
Follow the next steps to create a patient scheduling system and transform your clinic.
Step 1. Add All Your Medical Services
Location: the Services menu
First of all, categorize and add your medical services, from routine check-ups to specialized procedures.
The BookingPress plugin has the option to craft compelling descriptions as well as upload visuals for every service to help you better sell them, of course!
Do you have optional or necessary extra that patients need to buy before the service? BookingPress allows you to create extra services for extra revenue. Offer your clients to also book things like vaccinations, lab tests, or nutritional consultations when they are scheduling their appointment at your clinic.
Flexible scheduling options are a true helper for some types of clinics, especially therapists. This is about letting you patients not just choose the time based on their needs but also pick the duration of the appointment among pre-set options.
Besides that, feel free to create unbookable window time between appointments to ensure smooth transitions, organize all the sanitizing processes, and avoid patient overlap.
With the Cart add-on enabled on your site, you can allow patients to schedule several services during one booking!
With numerous payment options available right in the plugin or with free extensions, you can connect more than 15 payment gateways to your WordPress website through the BookingPress booking plugin, thus enabling full and partial payments online for chosen medical services.
When a booking is placed by a patient, they are offered to add it to their preferred calendars.
Not a rare thing that patients plan their visit very ahead of time, that’s why this option will help them not forget about their plans and significantly reduce no-shows for your business.
Step 2. Work with Staff & Availability Management
Location: The staff menu
If you are not a solo medical professional, you can turn on the option of choosing a doctor in the appointment scheduling form.
Every employee can have an individual profile with their specialties and qualifications. In this profile, they can manage their appointments, clients, and schedules.
Using the shift scheduling options, staff can build their own availability accommodating days off, holidays, and specific needs. There is a very intuitive interface for this offered by BookingPress.
Of course, you will need to assign specific medical services to each provider, so that your clients always get to the right doctor.
It’s worth mentioning that through the main Staff menu, practitioners can seamlessly stay updated with appointments through their synced Google Calendars.
The plugin’s flexibility doesn’t end there – you can create a schedule for every person individually as well as globally for the whole clinic.
Step 3. Set up Multiple Locations & Rooms
Location: the Locations menu
It’s very convenient for your patient to choose their preferred clinic location during booking. BookingPress will help you properly add multiple rooms or areas, enabling you to easily handle appointments across different locations.
It’s not much to customize but you can update each location’s profile with photos, contact information, and available services.
Step 4. Configure Payments, Notifications & More
Location: the Settings menu
There are multiple menus and options to help you tailor the payment process – or even disable online transactions yet register payment manually at the medical office. If you want to opt for a more reliable way to secure appointments, PayPal, Stripe, Klarna, and many more tools are offered for seamless transactions with BookingPress.
Moreover, you can manage partial deposits at checkout and define clear cancellation policies.
To keep patients informed about all the steps of the booking process, make sure you edit the email templates for every interaction. It’s also possible to choose SMS and WhatsApp messages.
Moreover, BookingPress offers a set of free add-ons to use in different aspects of your clinic business: manage invoices, taxes, deposits, coupons, waiting lists, and even such marketing-boosting features as online tips.
You’ll find all these awesome extensions in the Add-ons menu of the plugin: simply select the needed ones and enable them on your website!
Step 5. Add a Patient Scheduling Form to Your Website
In WordPress, it’s easy to add a widget to any page, whether you are on Elementor, default block editor or the Classic Editor. Just add the shortcodes generated by the BookingPress plugin with the appropriate block, widget, or the [bookingpress_form] shortcode.
Before you add the form, make sure to customize it to your needs by using the color palette options, fonts, etc. Make it look right on your WordPress site with simple edits!
To conclude: The easiest way to create a patient appointment scheduling system
Implement patient scheduling with the BookingPress software to experience almost immediate results – faster and error-free bookings, easier payment and reservation management, as well as more productive doctors. In particular, following our guide, it’s really easy to:
- Build a clinic booking form with a choice of location.
- Customize schedules for every professional.
- Control unlimited payments and appointments without fees, in one user-friendly dashboard.
- Enable patients to pay online with a choice of payment gateways.
- Manage cancellations and reschedules.
This will ultimately promise your clinic a better patient retention rate, more transparent revenue, and better interactions with your patients overall.
