Hi Carolie,
Yeah, you're right, that is one of the big challenges of scheduling.
AppointmentPlease can enforce simple scheduling rules for you automatically - it doesn't give patients free reign on your scheduling book unless you want it to. By default, until you set up "public schedules" for the doctors dictating when patients can schedule for specific types of service, patients can't schedule anything. You basically set up the program by white-listing the times that patients are allowed to schedule in for each service. Also, for each public schedule, you can dictate how far out from today they must schedule, how far out they're allowed to schedule, how much notice they have to give to cancel, and so on.
As an example, we have it set up to schedule shots in the morning, checkups in the morning, and sick patients in the afternoon to keep them segregated. We then have some catch-all times at a couple times for those that can't fit in at those times, and we have some slots that open up just the night before and same day for emergencies.
If someone schedules something they shouldn't, it's pretty easy to see why they scheduled, and you can reschedule them fairly quickly. This ends up being the rare exception rather than the rule, however, at least for us.
And really, most of our patients prefer self-service to customer service. I think it's because they don't have to call during business hours and that they can take more than a minute choosing a time. Maybe some other reasons I don't know. But it's worked very well for us.
Last edited by eriaac; 12/24/2009 4:57 AM. Reason: A bit of cleanup
