h3. Wellness appointments, like spay/neuter appointments, can also be made by public clients themselves online.
This feature allows clients to choose the type of appointment their animal needs, the appointment time and asks the client for information about their animal prior to the appointment. This saves your clinic time and eases the process. To understand how the online appointment scheduler works, review this section of our manual.
Enabling Wellness Appointment Types
- First, you’ll need to verify that all your wellness appointment types are created here.
- Next, open up your wellness rooms by following this guide.
- To enable your appointment types for online scheduling, go to Settings > E-Appointments.
- Click enable
Test your form
To ensure appointments are showing up properly, click Preview in New Tab under your E-appointment link. If appointments are not showing up, ensure the spay/neuter calendar is open, wellness calendar rooms are open, and the appointment types are enabled.
Note: Wellness rooms can only be open if the Spay/Neuter calendar is open. If you are not performing S/N surgeries, open the calendar day and set all S/N capacities to zero by clicking Adjust Capacity for Today Only.
What Information is Collected in this E-Form?
1. Choose the type of appointment.
2. Enter the type of animal you are making an appointment for and choose a date from the list of available appointments.
3. Fill in client information (perhaps using fake info to test the form) and click the Animal Information button at the bottom. Then fill in the animal info and progress to the next screen.
4. Then select services, and finally, if your clinic collects a deposit or merely gives paying online as an option, you’ll see payment fields that are available. Here your client completes their appointment by clicking the green button to Request Appointment. Since you likely don’t want to input your credit card, you can go ahead and close the browser.
5. Your client will see a pop-up to let them know the appointment is pending. They will also receive an email that lets them know to expect a confirmation email soon.
Confirming The E-Appointment
As soon as the client makes the appointment online, the appointment is pulled off of your calendar. However, it’s important not to duplicate the client and animal, so there must be a screening process first to determine if the client is already in your database. To do this, follow the following steps:
1. Click on the green E-Apps button in the upper left corner of the calendar or go to the Online Appointments page in the navigation menu.
2. Choose the Wellness Appointments tab:
Finding the wellness appointment tab3. Click the green Confirm button for the client you’d like to confirm.
4. In the example below, the owner has been to the clinic before, but this is a new animal. Here you would select the owner, but notice the animal’s name is Sheldon– which is a new animal to the clinic that’s not on his list of pets. So you would click the owner’s name and click the light blue button Owner selected but start new animal record. If you are doing this as an exercise, you may have other choices here. Choose the appropriate one. Once confirmed, the owner is sent your clinic’s confirmation email.
Same owner, new animal appointment confirmationChanging Services While Confirming An E-Appointment
You might also notice there’s a little pencil edit tool. When clients submit appointments online and select services (again, selection of services is an optional feature your clinic can turn on or off), you can remove an item. For example, if they add a rabies vaccine for a puppy that is too young for a rabies shot, you can remove the item. Or, if they don’t add an item but indicate in the notes field that they want it, you can add it on the e-appointments approval screen.
Timing Of E-Appointments
When the clock strikes midnight in your time zone, appointments are no longer available for online requests. For example, if today is February 1st, clients can request an e-appointment for the next day, February 2nd, up until midnight on February 1st.
Same-day appointment requests cannot be made. The e-appointment form will only show future date availability. Same-day scheduling must be done internally.
In Settings, you can also control how far out appointments are allowed to book based on the number of months. To adjust this, go to Settings > E-Appointments > Edit button > “Number of months to book in the future.”
Adding Or Restricting Services Within E-Appointments
You can now add or remove services for each E-Appointment to streamline each service.
In Settings > E-Appointments, you can now restrict which service items (and packages) are offered for which appointment types online. For example, for vaccine clinics, you can restrict the available services to vaccines only – or e-pharmacy to flea meds only.
You can also force clients to select at least one service before they can make the appointment.
And then, you can add a description for the item that will display and make it crystal clear what the item is.
Key Differences between S/N and Wellness E-Appointments
Wellness appointments cover a vast range of services such as medication pickups, sick exams, dentals, and much more. Spay/Neuter appointments can always have other services, such as a dental, attached. However wellness appointments cannot add spay or neuter as an “add on” line item. This is because of the way different appointment types are tied to every key function in HQ.
If a client comes in for a scheduled wellness appointment, but a spay or neuter is also requested, you’ll need to delete and recreate the appointment as spay/neuter appointment and then add the other services on.
Appointment Ideas
Some clinics provide telemedicine appointments, food pantry pickups, and mailed preventatives. We want to show you how to set this up if you want to do the same.
Key things to know:
- Different appt types can require or not require a payment. Example: A telemedicine consult can require a $25 payment, but a food pantry pick does not require payment.
- Different appt types can enable service selection online or not. For example, an e-pharmacy where you put the medication in the mail to the client can let them select what kinds of flea meds they want, but a food pantry appointment would not let them select the kind of food they want.
Tele-medicine
You can set this up as a wellness appointment type and require a payment order to be able to make the appointment. Here we recommend using the service item: Telemedicine Consultation. We do not have an app yet that will let you actually do the appointment via FaceTime. We are analyzing whether it’s worth it for us to provide this kind of feature because there are many companies that already do this.
Food Pantry pickups
We have added 30 different sizes of food bags for cats and dogs (and puppies). These are products that all begin with dry food or wet food. The idea is to NOT enable these services to be selected online (since you may or may not have what a client would select), but instead, when you are confirming the appointment via the e-apps panel, you use the little pencil to then assign the food bag size based on the species and weight of the animal. That way, the folks in the pantry can pull up HQ and know what food size bag to prep for the client.
