Maintaining an organized calendar is integral to running your group practice successfully, which is why we've allowed for increased customization within this feature. In this guide, you’ll find best practices for keeping your group practice calendar organized and clear.
We’ll cover:
Calendar visibility for all team member access levels
Each clinician’s schedule is visible to the entire clinical and administrative staff. We’ve made the decision to keep this information accessible to help prevent office locations from accidentally being double-booked. However, there are a couple of things to keep in mind:
- Team members with the Clinician with Basic Access role will be able to view all scheduled appointments, but they won’t have access to view or edit appointment details for clients they don't have access to.
- Team members with the Biller or Scheduler role will have access to view and edit all clients' appointments.
- This is important for adherence to HIPAA’s Meaningful Use clause, which states that administrative staff should only have access to PHI that's required for them to do their jobs.
- Team members with the Practice Manager role can view all clients’ appointments, but they won’t be able to edit appointment details.
How to use Calendar filters
You can use Calendar filters to sort your calendar view to find the information you’re looking for more easily. You can filter by:
- Location
- Clinician
- Time frame
Here are some additional tips for using your calendar in a group practice:
- You can create an office location for each individual room. That way, when filtering the calendar view by Location, you can see availability at a glance, which can help clinicians avoid accidentally double booking the same location.
- We recommend using the Day view to break down each clinician's schedule clearly and reduce an overlapping appearance.
Note: If your practice wants more privacy surrounding their daily schedules, the best way to achieve this would be to open separate accounts.
FAQs
Can we still use the Google Calendar 2-way Sync?
Yes, your practice can use our Google Calendar 2-way sync. Each individual clinician is able to connect their own schedule to a Google Calendar account. However, there isn't a way to connect a SimplePractice calendar to multiple Google Calendar accounts.
This means that clinicians in a group practice won't be able to see each other's schedules using Google Calendar, unless your practice shares one designated Google Calendar account.
How will appointments be scheduled?
It's important to keep in mind that each team member with access to a client will be able to adjust that client's appointment details, regardless of the clinician holding the appointment.
This is something to be cautious of, so that appointments aren't accidentally rescheduled. To help manage this, here are some tips:
- Anyone can accept an appointment request and adjust the time of an appointment. This will be tracked in the Account Activity, but it’s a good idea to have a protocol in place for who accepts appointment requests in your practice.
- Communication is key. A great way to communicate schedule adjustments effectively between team members is via Secure Messaging.
- Have clinicians stay on top of managing their own Availability, as this will lay the foundation for a well organized group practice calendar.
- Each clinician should create their own Availability blocks, and decide which services they offer during a certain time.
- If a clinician doesn't want their services to be bookable online, they can omit their Availability so that all appointments must be booked by phone.
