The clinician's guide to online scheduling and appointment requests

If you wanna run and grow a healthy practice, you wanna make it simple and seamless for a client to schedule an appointment with you. And with SimplePractice's built in scheduling feature, you can do just that. You don't have to play phone tag. You don't need to go back and forth sending emails. The client doesn't have to wait very long. Everyone saves time, and it makes the process much easier and much less stressful. And in this video, we have three objectives. First, you're gonna see what it looks like when a new client requests an appointment. Second, we're gonna learn how to respond to these appointment requests. We're gonna learn how to accept the appointment, decline the appointment, and also how to schedule a different time. And then finally, I'm gonna show you where you can go in the SimplePractice settings to set this up for yourself. My name is Matt Ryan. I am a therapist and group practice owner based in New York City. And if you wanna check out other videos all about how to run and grow an efficient practice, then you can check out my YouTube page, which is linked down below in the description. Alright. So the first thing we're gonna do today is learn what it looks like from the client's perspective to actually schedule an appointment with you using the online scheduler. So here we are on my group practice website. It is called Progress Therapy, and you'll notice right when you come to the site, there are three free consultation, client portal, and contact us. And today, we're gonna imagine that the client wants to set up a free consultation. So the client is gonna come over and simply click free consultation, and then this launches the SimplePractice scheduling tool where the client can schedule the appointment, and it's really simple. So here we are. You can see that I only have one type of appointment that a client can schedule online, and this is the consultation appointment. Now if you wanna be able to let clients schedule forty five minute sessions or sixty minute sessions or intake appointments, whatever it may be, you can add that in as well. You can really have a client schedule any kind of appointment online that you choose. But for today's example, we're gonna say that the client's gonna schedule a new client phone consultation. So they're gonna come over here, and they're gonna click select. And then they're gonna go ahead, and they're gonna choose the progress virtual video office. So we are an all virtual practice, and so our location is virtual. Now if you had other locations like in person and virtual or just in person, then your practice address, your practice location is gonna show up on this screen. So they're gonna go ahead and click select. And then from here, they now have access to the times that are available. Now these are times that I already preselected, so I know they work with my schedule. So right now, we're here looking at December, and the next available would be Wednesday, December seventh. And they can choose from nine thirty to nine forty five. They can choose five o'clock. All the availability is right here for them to choose from. If they wanted to schedule a week out, they can click on the fifteenth, and you'll see there are other slots here as well. Nine thirty, nine forty five, four forty five, five, and so on and so on. So they can really choose any day that you have available. And so let's imagine that this client wants to schedule for the fifteenth at nine forty five. We're simply gonna click on that nine forty five slot. They'll simply enter some basic information in here and click request appointment. And then they will see a confirmation page where they can get more information about the time, the date, and the location. There's no more phone tag back and forth, no more emails, no more waiting, but a client can go onto your website and choose an appointment time that you've already decided works for you. This makes the whole process seamless. Next, we're gonna take a look at what this request actually looks like from the provider's perspective. So here we are inside SimplePractice, and you'll notice right up here under requests, there's this little red alert that pops up. You'll simply click on this, and then you'll see the request details. Now this is a test account, so this person's name is Jamie Appleseed, and you'll see here that it gives you the date and time of the request, and we'll see that it was made a minute ago from the client portal. So some really helpful details right there. You'll also see the client's age, and you'll see whether or not this is a new or existing client. And then so from here, what we wanna decide is whether or not we wanna accept it or decline it. And if we accept it, what we're saying is that this time and this date works for us. And we're just gonna go ahead and confirm that so the client knows that we have also confirmed that this works. If we've declined this, this does not mean that we are telling the client we are not taking new clients, but perhaps something came up and this appointment slot is no longer available. If that's the case, then what you can do is decline the request and then set up another time that may work better for both of you. We're gonna show you how to do both. So in this example, let's imagine that we say, yes. This appointment time works, and we want to accept it. We're simply gonna go over here and click accept. It's then gonna bring us to this page where we can decide what documents we wanna send to this client. So this is an intake, then maybe you wanna send all of your intake paperwork. If it's just a phone consultation and you're getting to know the client, maybe you're not gonna send anything. And so for this example, it's a new client phone consultation. We haven't really begun care yet, so we're not gonna send any documents. I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna uncheck these documents so that nothing is sent, and then I'm gonna push continue to email. And from here, a little window pops up where you can compose an email to the client confirming the appointment. Now the default template works quite well, but you can also customize this if you'd like. Now let's say you're using Zoom or it's just gonna be a phone call. You can simply type in, I will give you a call at the number provided. And here you have one final screen where you can confirm the details. It all looks good to me. And then we're gonna go ahead and click share and send now. And now what we see is that this client is on your schedule. Here they are. They've scheduled an appointment. You've confirmed it, and you will be calling them or seeing them at that time. It's that simple. And now this time, let's go back and see what it's like when we need to decline an appointment. And now once again, declining appointment can mean that your practice is full and you're not able to take new clients, or it can mean that that slot no longer works for you. Alright. So let's go in. So we, again, see the appointment request with the red alert. We click that. We view the appointment details, and we say, oh, that time does not work. Let's go ahead and decline it and pick a new time. So we're gonna go ahead and click decline. A different window is gonna pop up, and it's gonna ask you why is this appointment being declined. You'll see that over here on the left hand side. Now for this example, let's say that this is a scheduling conflict. So we're gonna put that in here, and then we can go ahead and look at the email. The default template is pretty good. It says that unavailable at the time you selected. Please click the link below to find another time that works for you. Again, you can use the default that SimplePractice provides, which is quite good, or you can customize it the same way we did before. For the sake of this video, we'll use this default template. We'll go ahead and click decline and send now. And there you have it. The appointment is now declined, and the client will go ahead and pick a new time. And it's that simple. That is how you accept or decline appointment requests that clients have scheduled online. Finally, let's talk about how to set up this availability in your SimplePractice account. Now we're gonna break this down into three steps, and the first is deciding which kind of appointment you want to have available for online scheduling. So do you want a simple phone consultation? Do you want an intake appointment? Do you want follow-up appointments? You really wanna be careful to decide which appointments are available for online scheduling so that it becomes helpful for your practice and not a burden. For most providers, having an initial phone consultation is where you wanna start. So definitely think about which kind of appointment you want to have available in your account, and that's the first step. Second, you'll then need to go into the settings to create this type of appointment. So if it's a new client phone consultation, you're gonna have to create that service inside the settings. There's a link up above to another video all about how to create these types of services and make them available for online scheduling. And then finally, you're gonna wanna go to your website and test your online scheduling feature to make sure it works for your clients. I hope you found this video helpful, and please do go ahead and like and subscribe. And if you want more resources where you can find more helpful guides, you can go to support dot simple practice dot com.

SimplePractice's online scheduling tool is really powerful. For some people, it can be intimidating to set that up. So in today's video, we're gonna jump into SimplePractice and set up a two hour block of time for phone consultations using the online scheduling tool. My name is Matt Ryan. I am a therapist and group practice owner based in New York City. And if you wanna check out other videos all about how to run and grow an efficient practice, then you can check out my YouTube page, which is linked down below in the description. I'm consistently putting out content to help providers run and grow efficient practices. And so you can see here on my own SimplePractice calendar, I have phone consults available for online scheduling from twelve to two every Friday. And so by the end of this video, you're gonna learn how to set up a two hour time block for phone consultations. And there are gonna be three areas that we need to customize. Your appointment request settings, the services, and your availability. So let's start with your appointment request settings. So here we are in SimplePractice. You're gonna navigate over here to the left hand side, and you're gonna go ahead and you're gonna click settings. You're then gonna go to Client Portal section. And now we're gonna see here this section for online appointment requests. Now you can toggle this on or off. Now, we do want to go ahead and have this enabled because we are working on scheduling online appointments. So make sure this is toggled on. And then below that, you're gonna see there are several places for customization. So the first thing is you can decide on what recurrence you want to have your appointment. So do you want it to happen on the full hour, on the half hour, on the quarter hour? You can go ahead and customize this to your liking. For this demonstration, we're gonna do it on the half an hour. So we can have appointments available from nine to nine thirty, nine thirty to ten, this kind of thing. And then you can also customize how much lead time you wanna have or how far in advance a client can request an appointment. So if you don't want any last minute requests, you wanna make sure that this is set to something like two days before start time or three days before start time. If you choose something like one hour before start time, then a client's gonna be able to log in and book an appointment an hour before the start time. If this works for you, then great. If not, choose something like two days before start time. And then you can say, and up to how many weeks in advance. So if you don't want clients to be able to schedule too far out in advance, go ahead and make this something like four weeks or two weeks in advance. You can go as far as six months in advance, but again, this is up to your personal preference and how your practice operates. And next, you can decide whether or not new clients can request appointments, or you can customize it so that only your current clients can go in and schedule appointments. Now, again, we want it so that new clients can schedule because this is going to be for a phone consultation so that new folks can go ahead and schedule with us. So we're gonna make sure that this is set to yes. And then moving down, you can decide which kind of clients are able to schedule with you. So is it gonna be individual clients? Is it gonna be couples? Or new contacts on behalf of someone else? For the sake of this video, we're gonna do new individual clients only, and then you can decide whether or not a credit card is required for booking an online appointment. In this case, we're gonna go ahead and select no because we don't require a credit card for a free phone consultation. We're then gonna go ahead and click save settings. And then next, we wanna learn how to create a service for your phone consultations, and the folks over at SimplePractice made this quite simple. So right from the client portal settings that we were just in, you're gonna notice that next to the section that says, can new clients request appointments on the right hand side, there's a link that says billing and services. We're gonna go ahead and click this. And then in here, by default, you're gonna see some standard services already created. So psychotherapy forty five, initial phone consultation, psychotherapy sixty, group therapy. Now we already have the initial phone consultation created here, but I'm gonna show you how to create it again so that you can do this yourself. So in this page, we're gonna go ahead and click add new service, and this is what's gonna be displayed to clients when they're scheduling online. So maybe we wanna call this a new client phone consult. You can name it whatever you like, but make sure it's clear and descriptive so the client knows what they're scheduling. Right? So there's that. And then you're also gonna see service, and this is gonna be a service code. Now for standard therapy appointments, like a forty five minute session, there's standard codes like nine zero eight three four, or for sixty minutes, nine zero eight three seven. However, for a new client phone consultation, I don't think there are any specific codes, so we have to create our own. This is not really a problem though. We're gonna go in, we're gonna click the little arrow next to service, and then we're gonna be able to create our own service code. You can make it something simple like five zeros. Right? It will allow you to do that, or you can even go in and just type in something like phone. And it will say, do you wanna add a new code? You can click add new code, and there you go, phone pops up for this service. And underneath, we're gonna see that we can choose the rate and the default duration. So for the rate, we're gonna have zero dollars. This is a free phone consultation. And for the default duration, we're gonna make this thirty minutes because remember, we want our appointments to recur every thirty minutes, nine, nine thirty, ten, ten thirty, that kind of thing. And then a couple other settings that you want to adjust are the booking options. So we wanna make sure that the available for online appointment requests is checked because, again, we want this phone consultation to be something a client can schedule online. So go ahead and make sure that that box is checked. We also wanna make sure that allow for new clients is also checked because, again, this is a phone consultation, an introductory call. We want new clients to be able to go in and schedule an appointment. So go ahead and make sure that is checked as well. If it's not checked, then only existing clients within your SimplePractice platform will be able to schedule. And then we wanna make sure that this one, require clients to call to request available appointment, is unchecked. Make sure that this is not checked off because if it is, then it will block your online availability and nothing will display as available. So go ahead and make sure that this is off. And then you can go ahead and customize how many minutes before and how many minutes after the appointment. Right? So let's say you do a thirty minute phone consultation, yet you want five minutes before to prepare and five minutes after to write the note. You can say block off five minutes before and block off five minutes after. And so what you're gonna have on the calendar displayed is a five minute buffer window, the phone consultation for thirty minutes, and then a five minute buffer after the consultation. And you can customize this to be whatever you would like. And then we're simply gonna click save. And that's it. You've now set up a new service, a phone consultation that clients can schedule online. And so the last thing we wanna do is set up availability in our calendar, and this is really, really simple. So and when you're in your calendar, at the top right, you're gonna see the button called availability. You're gonna click on this, and it now switches from the view where you see your clients and your appointments to a view where you see your availability as their provider. And so what we wanna do is create a slot for availability. SimplePractice prevents double booking, so you wanna make sure that your availability and your current client appointments do not overlap. Alright. So once you've picked your date and time, we're simply gonna go ahead on the calendar, and you can see here that we already have our twelve to two availability set. And for the sake of this tutorial, we're gonna create another availability on Thursday. We're gonna go ahead and click into the Thursday calendar, and then you're gonna see this window pop out from the right hand side. And we can label this whatever we want. This will not be shown to the clients. This is simply for your reference. So I'm gonna put new client phone consult, which will let me know that this slot, this availability is for new client phone consult, and I'm gonna select that it happens every Thursday, and we're gonna make this slot available from twelve PM to two PM. So now we have a two hour block of phone consultation availability. And we want this to only occur on Thursdays, so we're gonna go ahead and make sure that all the other days are unchecked, meaning they look white, and the one day that we want is checked off with blue. So here we see that Thursday is checked off with blue, and then we're gonna have this just repeat on our calendar indefinitely. You can always go back and delete this or adjust this later. But for now, we wanna have recurring availability every Thursday from twelve PM to two PM as far into the future as possible. Now a quick tip for you is that you can actually create different locations inside of SimplePractice. So you can create a phone consultation location so that when a client logs in online, the location displays as phone consultation. That way you prevent confusion. Because if they go in and they see address, they might think that it's in person. Or if they see a virtual office address, they might think that it's gonna be a video conference call. Now if it is in person or it's a video conference call, then great. You can make sure that these stay the same. However, it's a phone call, you wanna make that really clear for client. So in another video, you can learn how to create different locations, and you can see that here. And so for the sake of this video, we're gonna check off the telehealth. That way the client knows that this is not an in person visit. And then finally, you wanna make sure that you add the service that you created. So you'll simply click add service, and then you can go ahead and select the service that we just created, initial phone consultation, no charge. So this will be very clear for the client. And then from there, we're gonna go ahead and click save. And then our final step is to make sure that this works from the client's perspective. So what we wanna do is go to our client portal website, and you can find that address in the settings over here. We're gonna go to the left hand side and click settings, a client portal, and at the very top, you're gonna see a link to your client portal website. You can go ahead and click this, and then we're gonna see our client portal. We're gonna click I'm a new client, and then you'll see that the initial phone consultation shows up. Right? We're gonna select that location. We know that this is not in person, and then we're gonna click select. And then finally, we see here our availability, and a client will be able to schedule that no problem. That is how you create a two hour block of time for online scheduling. I hope that video was helpful for you. If you wanna learn more about SimplePractice and how to use this platform, you can go to support dot simple practice dot com.