Send patients a link to choose an available appointment slot right from their phones. Appointment availability is pulled in real-time directly from your practice’s schedule in your PM system. This allows you to schedule patients without the back and forth.
Before we begin: This functionality requires that you're using athenahealth, Modernizing Medicine, or Nextech as your PM system, and it's integrated with Klara.
In this article:
Set up or update patient-facing appointment reasons
Before you start using the scheduling request, you’ll want to make sure that you have the appointment types or appointment purposes that you want visible to patients set up correctly with their patient-friendly reasons listed. Please work with your Customer Success Manager at Klara to do this!
How the scheduling link works
Sending
When the patient is ready to schedule an appointment, you’ll select a scheduling template, add the scheduling link by clicking the calendar button below the message composer, and click “Send.”
Choosing the appointment slot as a patient
The patient will receive a text message letting them know that they have a message from your practice (like any other message sent through Klara).
When they click into the message and click the “Book an appointment” link, they’ll be able to narrow down the list of appointments by appointment reason, location, and provider. You'll work with your Klara Customer Success Manager to set up custom appointment reasons that are patient-friendly. In the background, these appointment reasons will connect to the appropriate appointment type or purpose in your PM system.
When viewing providers, they can sort by a specific provider or select "Any, first available" to show the first available provider.
Only the appointment slots that are available in your PM system will display to the patient. The patient will select an appointment slot, review the details, and click “Confirm.”
The patient will then see a message that lets them know that their appointment has been booked. They’ll also be sent a text with the same information.
If the request fails to confirm the appointment in the PM system after the patient clicks "Confirm," the patient will see a message that says their request was sent to your practice to finalize.
Receiving the patient’s request
As soon as the patient submits their request by clicking “Confirm,” a message will be added to the patient’s conversation with the appointment details and the appointment will be confirmed in their PM system. The appointment description in the PM system will include a note stating what appointment reason the patient selected (example: Booked through Klara with reason “Botox”).
If the appointment fails to book in the PM system, you'll see a system message added to the conversation, which will automatically be routed to the “To Schedule” list in Klara.
Whoever in your practice is responsible for scheduling should be assigned to this list so that they’re notified if this happens. They can use the information in the message to schedule the appointment in the PM system.
Common questions
Q: If a guardian is scheduling a visit for their child, how will they know what child they’re scheduling the visit for?
A: The guardian will see the patient’s initials when they go to schedule their visit.