Setting up and customizing online booking for your clinic

Online booking – the ability for your patients to self-book appointments online – is included as part of your TELUS Collaborative Health Record (CHR) software.

You can activate online booking at any time by enabling one or more appointment types for online booking (see Creating and modifying appointment types), and then enabling these appointment types to be booked in provider schedules via working hours (refer to Adding and modifying a schedule's standard working hours).

Through clinic-wide online booking settings, appointment type settings, scheduling hours, appointment notifications and custom text, you can customize the online booking functionality to optimize your clinical workflows and enhance your patients' experience.

A visual summary of the relationship between the settings that make up online booking and where in the system you can configure them.

1. Review and customize your clinic-wide online booking settings.

2. If your clinic has multiple locations, select the locations where patients can book at and, optionally, add clinic descriptions or group locations together. See Setting up multiple locations for online booking.

📌 Note: The online booking appointment time zone pulls from the location's time zone, if the location time zone is not configured, the account time zone is used.

3. Add new appointment types for online booking or set up any of your current appointment types for online booking. See Creating and modifying appointment types.

📌 Note: You enable an appointment type for online booking by selecting New Patients and/or Existing Patients beside Types of patients allowed to book. If neither option is selected, it won't appear for online booking.

4. On each provider schedule, add or modify working hours so they allow appointment types that are set up for online booking to be booked during desired times. See Setting up a provider schedule for online booking.

5. If you want to require patients to select a primary reason for their visit:

    a) In your clinic-wide online booking settings, choose to Display Presenting Issue Selection (eBooking).

    b) Add or modify the presenting issues you want patients to choose from.

📌 Note: You make a presenting issue visible for online booking by "allowing services" (i.e. by selecting Appointment Types in the Services area) that are enabled for online booking.

6. Optionally, customize appointment notifications patients see when they book appointments through the appointment booking site.

7. Optionally, customize the text on your patient-facing appointment booking site or Customizing the text on your patient portal.

8. If providers want their biography to display for patients, either ask providers to update their biography via their profile settings, or update their biography for them.

💡 Tip: For more online booking tips and tricks, check out our CHR Webinar: Optimising your appointment booking workflow.