Booking an appointment

With multiple options and features available to assist you in booking appointments, this article covers these and how to use them.

• Creating an appointment
• Appointment search

Creating an appointment

With there being several ways to access the appointment book there is more than one way to book an appointment in EXACT, including double-clicking the specific day and column, dragging the mouse from and to the specific place in the appointment book in a known gap or right-clicking then selecting Create Appointment.

All three of these techniques will open the Edit Appointment Window, where you can fill in the required fields before saving or adding the appointment to the clipboard to book later on.

Appointment search

• Searching by provider
• Searching by rooms (if enabled)
• Searching with locations enabled
• Searching with coordinated duties enabled

The Appointment Search tool provides you with the ability to find gaps in the appointment book without the need to endlessly scroll through the appointment book looking for white space.

Appointment Search displays the recommended day, session, and start times with the flexibility to change options while in discussion with the patient.

The search returns appointment options that are adjacent to others in the book, thereby preventing the appointment from being located in the middle of a large un-utilised smaller gap.

The Appointment Search can be launched from the Appointment Workflow Departure Bar and the Clipboard & Hold List. See Enabling Appointment Workflow for enabling the departure bar.

If the hold list contains multiple Appointments then right click an Appointment and select “Search”.

Multiple appointments in the Hold list: If two or more appointments are placed on the hold list and you click “Search All”, then the original multi-appointment search function will be used. In all other cases, the single appointment search will occur.

The search tool uses the patient appointment preferences (days and times) as recorded in the Patient Preferences area of the Patient File - Recalls tab. Any modified preferences in the search window for this appointment are NOT saved back to the patient file.

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 over to be for Any Dentist or Any Hygienist.

However if the appointment started out as being for Any Dentist, then 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.

Searching by room

If your appointment book uses Rooms (see: Setting Up Appointment Book 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.

Searching with locations enabled

For practices that use multiple Locations with or without Rooms enabled, see Appointment Search with multiple locations

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.

Recall Appointments default to the patients 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.

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.
See: Co-ordinated Duties Appointments for more details.