Booking virtual visits in any location and time zone
Previously, you could only book virtual visits in the Virtual location, which is in your CHR account’s time zone. You can now book virtual visits in any location and in any time zone.
In other words, you can book physical and virtual appointments in the same location in the schedule, making booking appointments more intuitive. This also provides a consistent workflow for booking physical and virtual appointments. And, if you have multiple locations in the same time zone, the schedule now accurately reflects which location the virtual visit is for.
This is particularly beneficial for accounts with multiple clinic locations spread across different time zones when booking virtual visits in more than one time zone. Your patients can now book virtual appointments online and receive the appointment notification in their correct time zone.
📌Note: If you don’t offer virtual appointments at your clinic, these updates do not apply to you. You will, however, notice a new Virtual location in your account. TELUS Health will delete this Virtual location in the upcoming weeks.
⚠️Important: This update does not affect your existing scheduled virtual appointments. They remain in a location called Virtual, with the time zone unchanged.
To avoid confusion and having virtual visits booked both in the Virtual location and a physical location, continue booking virtual appointments in the Virtual location. We recommend moving your upcoming virtual appointments and provider virtual working hours to your physical clinic location and then start booking virtual visits in the physical clinic location. Refer to Moving your existing virtual visits and working hours.
What’s new?
Selecting a location when booking a virtual appointment
When booking a virtual appointment, in the appointment booking window, you can now select a location. Refer to Booking a virtual visit for more information.
⚠️Important: You do not have virtual working hours set up in your clinic’s physical location. Therefore, keep using the Virtual location until you have moved your existing virtual working hours and virtual appointments to your clinic location.
When booking a virtual appointment, make sure Virtual under Location is selected (and not one of your clinic’s physical locations).
Filtering your schedule by visit type
You can now filter the Schedule to see available time slots for:
physical and virtual appointments (All)
only Physical appointments, or
only Virtual appointments for the location you're currently viewing.
For more information, refer to Filtering the Schedule.
📌Note: If your filter is set to All, when booking an appointment, you must select Virtual or Physical before you can select the appointment type.
Temporary filter added to the CHR Schedule
Currently, appointments booked in a specific clinic location display only in that location’s schedule. We added a temporary Classic Mode filter (enabled by default) that allows you to see all appointments booked in the Virtual location in every location’s schedule. This matches how your virtual appointments appeared within your schedule before the update.
Selecting visit type when configuring working hours
When adding provider working hours, you must now select Physical or Virtual for Visit Type. You can also filter the working hours to see both physical and virtual working hours together. For more information, refer to Adding standard working hours to schedules and Adding flexible working hours to provider schedules.
A new Virtual location added to your account
In Settings > Schedules > Locations, there is now a location called Virtual with its own time zone. This is where all your existing virtual appointments are now, with the time zone unchanged. Previously, the Virtual location was hard-coded and used your account’s time zone and could not be changed.
Moving your existing virtual visits and working hours
To book virtual appointments in the same location where you book in-person appointments, we recommend you move your existing virtual working hours and scheduled virtual appointments from the Virtual location to any of your clinic locations:
If your clinic has a single location (other than the Virtual one), TELUS Health will move your existing virtual working hours and scheduled virtual appointments from the Virtual location to your physical clinic location within the next few weeks, and will archive the Virtual location. We will notify you when this will take place.
If your clinic has more than one location (other than the Virtual one), and you want to move all your virtual working hours and scheduled virtual appointments from the Virtual location to only one location, TELUS Health can assist you. Complete the Virtual visits migration form. Alternatively, you can choose to move the working hours and appointments yourself. Refer to Moving your scheduled virtual appointments to a single location.
If your clinic has more than one location (other than the Virtual one), and you want to move your virtual working hours and scheduled virtual appointments from the Virtual location to various locations, you must move them yourself. Refer to Moving your scheduled virtual appointments to multiple locations.