To configure appointment types for your practice, please follow the steps below:

You will notice several additional features within your appointment type, which will help you better customize each type or appointment:

Virtual Only

Turned on: The appointment will only be scheduled as a virtual visit.

Turned off: The appointment will be booked based on the corresponding provider's availability settings (this may be virtual, or in-person). Click here to learn how to configure the clinician's availability.

If you want to provide patients with the choice of both virtual and in-person visits, you will want to create two separate appointment types (one for virtual, another for in-person).

Allow Instant Book:

Turned on- patients will be able to book without needing appointment confirmation. When they select the appointment, it will book onto the calendar as a confirmed appointment, and they will receive the confirmation booking email.

Turned off- Patients will be able to go through the flow and choose their appointment. The assigned provider will then receive an email to confirm the appointment. If the provider does not confirm via email, they can also confirm directly from their calendar. The appointment will show in their calendar with a bell icon, indicating this appointment needs to be confirmed. The patient will receive an email that their appointment request was received, and an additional email once the appointment is confirmed.

Minimum advanced notice

This allows you to decide how soon a patient is able to schedule an appointment. Hint has a default set to 4 hours, which you can change within the appointment type. If you set the notice to 4 hours, the earliest a patient can book is 4 hours from the current time. If 4 hours from the current time is after hours, the patient will not be able to book a same-day appointment, and will see appointments for the following business day.

Maximum future availability

This setting determines how far in advance you wish to allow patients to book appointments (Hint has a default of 4 weeks). You may wish to have different maximums on different appointment types, such as allowing patients to book further out for annual appointments, and so on.

Buffer Time

Setting buffer time before and after an appointment will allow you and your team time to prepare for your next appointment, travel to the appointment location, prepare equipment, etc. Buffer times will stack, or add-onto, each other.

Example: Appointment #1 is an Annual physical exam, which has a 15 minute buffer after the appointment. Appointment #2 is a sports physical which has a 15 minute buffer before the appointment. The calendar will stack the 15 minute "after" buffer for the annual physical and 15 minute "before" buffer for the sports physical to make a combined 30 minute buffer time. Appointment #2 (sports physical) will start 30 minutes after appointment #1 (annual physical) ends.

More information on the cancelation policy can be found in the Calendar FAQs