Maintaining an organized calendar is integral to running your group practice successfully, which is why we've allowed for increased customization of this feature. In this guide, you’ll find best practices for managing your group practice calendar.
We’ll cover:
- Setting up the calendar view
- Accessing the calendar based on your role and permissions level
- Using calendar filters
- Creating calendar events in a group practice
- FAQs
Note: To learn more about group practices, see Adding and managing team members.
Setting up the calendar
When you set up your SimplePractice group account, you can update the default time zone for your entire practice. To do this, see Setting the practice time zone.
You can also choose the Cancellation policy for your practice. To do this, click the dropdown menu under its section.
This setting will determine how many hours before an appointment a client will be able to cancel before incurring a fee, and whether they can cancel online via the Client Portal.
You can also indicate If you’d prefer that your clients call to cancel. For more information, see Setting up your practice's cancellation policy.
Each clinician in the practice also has the ability to sync their SimplePractice calendar with their personal calendar. For more information on how to utilize our calendar sync, see:
- Managing calendar sync for Google Calendar
- Managing calendar sync for Apple Calendar
- Managing calendar sync for Microsoft 365 Outlook Calendar
Our calendar sync feature links your SimplePractice calendar with your personal calendar. However, you won’t be able to sync your work calendar to multiple external calendars.
Accessing the calendar based on your role and permissions level
Each team member can update their individual calendar display, including the earliest and latest hours visible on their own calendar. For more information, see Customizing the calendar view.
Note: If you've set up a practice time zone for your practice, team members can still set a primary time zone to update times displayed in their own account. For more information, see Setting your primary time zone.
Each team member in your group practice, including all clinical and administrative team members, will be able to see everyone’s appointments. This information remains accessible to help prevent office locations from accidentally being double-booked.
However, there are several things to keep in mind:
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Team members with the clinician with basic access or clinician with billing access roles will be able to see that an appointment is scheduled, but won’t have access to view or edit appointment details for clients they don't have access to
- When they hover over the appointment, they'll see You don’t have permission to view this client’s appointments
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Team members with the practice biller or practice scheduler role will have access to view and edit all clients' appointments
- This adheres 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 won’t be able to edit appointment details
To learn more about roles and permissions, see Clinician roles available for team members and Administrative roles available for team members.
Important: Each person logging into a SimplePractice account is required to use their own email and password, even within a group practice. Sharing account login credentials violates Section 6 of our Terms of Service, results in an inaccurate HIPAA Audit Log for compliance, and puts the security of client data at risk.
Using 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:
- All team members
- All locations
- Day, Week, or Month
Here are some additional tips for using calendar filters in a group practice:
- You can create an office location for each individual room in an office. 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.
- You can use the Day view to break down each clinician's schedule clearly and reduce an overlapping appearance.
To learn more about using filters and our advanced calendar filters, see Using filters to view your calendar.
Creating calendar events and out of office blocks in a group practice
All team members in a group practice can create calendar events and out of office blocks on their calendar. These can also be assigned to any team member and also can include a location, if applicable.
If a team member assigns an event to themselves, they'll be able to mark that event as private. Private events aren't visible to any other team member, including the Account Owner.
For more information, see Creating a calendar event and Managing out of office blocks.
FAQs
- How will appointments be scheduled?
- Can I view other clinicians' appointments in the SimplePractice mobile app?
How will appointments be scheduled?
Each team member with access to a specific client will be able to adjust that client's appointment details, regardless of the clinician assigned to the appointment. To help manage this, here are some tips:
- Account Owners, clinicians with entire practice access, and schedulers 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
- A great way to communicate schedule adjustments effectively between team members is via Secure Messaging with your team
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Have clinicians stay on top of managing their own availability, as this will lay the foundation for a well-organized group practice calendar
- If a clinician doesn't want their services to be bookable online, they can display their availability without enabling online appointment requests
Can I view other clinicians' appointments in the SimplePractice mobile app?
Depending on your role, you can view other clinician’s appointments in the mobile app like you would in the web app. To do this, see Using calendar filters on iPhone/iPad and Using calendar filters on Android.