Adding flexible working hours to a provider schedule

📌 Note: You must have the Scheduling Settings permissions to set up provider schedules for your clinic. Refer to Modifying a user's permissions.

Before you can book an appointment for a provider, they must have working hours set. You set working hours to define when their schedule is open for appointment booking and to define what appointment type(s) can be booked during those hours.

If you allow patients to self-book appointments online through your CHR eBooking site, defining a provider's working hours also allows patients to choose available appointment times within those hours.

Use Flexible Hours for providers whose schedule changes daily, weekly or monthly. You can create flex hours on a one-off basis. For example, Doctor Dogood wants to see all her waitlisted patients this Saturday; you therefore add flex hours for Saturday.

Or you can create flex schedule templates for when the same working hours will be applied over multiple dates or for other providers (such as a 'Saturday clinic' template). For more information, visit Creating flexible schedule templates.

⚠️ Important: You can have either standard or flex working hours applied to a specific time slot in the provider's schedule, not both.

When you set a provider's flexible working hours, you define:

What hours are available for in-person or virtual appointments
The appointment types offered
The number of patients that can be booked in a single time slot
The appointment time slot intervals

If your clinic has multiple clinic locations, and a provider works out of more than one location, you can set unique working hours for each location.

If you offer different appointment types at different times in a day, you can add multiple blocks of working hours in the same day. For example, a provider offers initial consultations on Mondays from 8 am to 11 am, and follow up appointments from 1 pm to 5 pm.

📌 Note: When a provider is available for appointments, the time appears white on the schedule (as opposed to the standard grey background). This allows users to clearly see provider availability.

Steps

From the main menu, click Settings > Scheduling > Hours.
Next to the provider's name, click Edit, and then select Flex.
In the <Provider's> Flexible Hours window, click + Add. The Add Flexible Hour window opens.
Configure the flex working hours as follows:

Field	Description
Date	Select the date for the flex working hours.
Time	Select the time the provider starts seeing patients for the specified services.
Duration	Select the duration of your flex hours. 📌 Note: For example, if your day ends at 4 pm and the working hour block starts at 12 pm, select a 4 hour duration. If you offer 30 minute appointments, the latest one can start is 3:30 pm. Select Other to enter a more specific duration with hours and minutes.
Location	If your clinic has multiple locations, select the clinic location that applies to the working hours. 💡 Tip: The default is your primary location.
Visit type	Select Physical for in-person visits and Virtual for virtual visits. 💡 Tips: If the provider meets patients over the phone: use Physical so the patient isn't sent a video invite. To have both Physical and Virtual hours scheduled at the same time, create two Flexible Hours.
Colour on schedules	Choose a colour you want to see on the schedule along the left side of these work hours.
Slot	Select the number of patients (1-10) that can be booked in one time slot. For more detail, visit Setting how many patients can self-book a single appointment time slot.
Intervals	Select the start time intervals staff can pick when searching availability. Patients who can book online also see the selected interval. You can choose increments of 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 45, or 60 minutes. For example, if Intervals are 15 minutes, search and eBooking show times that start on the :00, :15, :30, or :45. If set to 10 minutes, then :00, :10, :20, :30, :40, or :50. For more details, visit Setting a schedule's appointment time intervals for eBooking.
Stacking	This option is for eBooking only. When patients search for available appointments and they select a date, if this option is set to On, the CHR eBooking site provides only the first available appointment on that day as an option (without allowing the patient to select a time). This is known as "appointment stacking" because it fills up each day's schedule from earliest to latest and prevents gaps between appointments. For more details, visit Enabling appointment stacking for eBooking.
Services	Select the appointment types you offer during these working hours. 📌 Note: When you book an appointment the services offered appear in bold and the others are greyed out. You can enable a feature that hides the greyed out appointment types. Refer to Limiting appointment type options when booking appointments.

5. Click Save.

The <Provider's> Flexible Hours window appears and shows the visit types (in-person or virtual), configured flex hours with the location, date and times and appointment types.

💡 Tips:

To modify flex hours, click the work hour block.
To delete working hours, click X on the right.
You can have more than one flex hour block applied to the same work hours.

6. Click Close to return to the Scheduling Settings page.

7. Refresh your browser to see the flex working hours in the provider's schedule.

Updated November 23, 2023