The appointment book has an appointment search feature to help you locate spaces in the appointment book that are suitable for the appointment you are booking.

The feature has options to search by provider and rooms. You may see different options if you have locations or coordinated duties enabled in your practice.

Accessing the Appointment Search

1. You must have an appointment created in either the clipboard, workflow (departure bar) or the hold list.
   • You will need to click the search option in the workflow or right-click the patient name in the clipboard or the hold list then select search to open the appointment search.
   • When selecting the search all option, an alternative window (a legacy feature) will open allowing appointment selection for multiple patients at once.

Booking an Appointment using Appointment Search

The appointment search displays the recommended day, session, and start times with the flexibility to change options.

The search tool uses the patient appointment preferences (days and times) as recorded in the patient preferences area of the patient record under their recalls tab. Any changes made in the appointment search will not be saved to the patient record.

You can adjust the appointment preferences for the current appointment, with options to set a patient's preferred days, times, provider/s and the date to start searching.

1. Searching by provider:
   • If an appointment is for a specific provider, but no suitable results can be found, the provider selection will allow you to change the search to for any dentist or hygienist.

   • If the appointment started as being for any dentist the dropdown will allow you to select between any dentist or any hygienist or the patient's dentist or hygienist (if they have been set in the patient record).

   • To search for a different specific provider, you will need to close the search window and select a provider for the appointment.
     

2. Searching by room:
   
   • If your appointment book uses rooms to book appointments the search preferences will contain a room selector.
   • If the appointment is already selected to be in a particular room, this will be defaulted, but if not it will be set to any room. Use the dropdown menu to select any specific room, or set it to any room.
     
3. Searching with locations enabled:
   
   • For practices that use multiple Locations with or without rooms enabled see the article: Appointment Search with Multiple Locations.
4. Searching with clinics.
   • If your practice uses clinics, and has set some clinics in the future the search preferences will contain a "Clinics" selector. The default option is matching clinics and open space.
     
5. Recall appointments.
   • Recall Appointments default to the patient's recall due date, and the earliest selectable date will be configured in the "up to xx days before" (usually 90 days) setting in the Recall setup.
6. Searching with coordinated duties enabled:
   • For coordinated duty appointments, the search options will only appear if there is time selected for each provider type. e.g. With only dentist time selected, then only the dentist dropdown menu will appear.

Tips and Tricks

• The search will return appointment options adjacent to others in the book, thereby preventing the appointment from being booked in the middle of a large un-utilised smaller gap.
• Appointments placed in the Hold List/on the clipboard are not saved when you close the appointment book. If you try to close the appointment book and there are appointments in the Hold List, a warning will appear. You then have the opportunity to place these appointments in new slots or to click Yes and permanently delete them.