Practice Calendars for Resources and Team Members

Not everything your practice schedules belongs to a clinician. A sauna, a massage table, an MRI machine or an exam room all have their own hours, and appointments need to be booked against them the same way they are booked against a provider.

Practice calendars let you give a resource or a team member their own bookable calendar, with its own availability, its own location and its own booking rules.

What is a practice calendar?

A practice calendar is a bookable schedule that belongs to one owner. You'll find them in Practice Settings > Scheduling > Calendars, where every calendar in your practice is listed with its type, location and last update.

Scheduling settings with the Calendars tab open, listing each practice calendar with its type and location

There are two kinds of owners:

Resource: a room, a piece of equipment, or any bookable space
Team member: a clinician or staff member in your practice

Click + Calendar and pick the one you need. For a resource, you can select an existing resource or create a new one right in the dialog. Each calendar is assigned to a location, so multi-location practices keep their schedules separate.

Setting availability

Open a calendar and click + Availability to reach the Manage Calendar screen. Availability is set in one of two modes:

Day of the week: a weekly pattern that repeats, such as every Monday
Custom dates: one or more specific dates on the month grid

The Manage Calendar screen with Calendar Mode set to Day of the week and Monday selected

For each day or date, add one or more time slots, choose the appointment types and visit types the slot accepts, and set whether the rule repeats. You can also use Block calendar to close the calendar for that period. The month grid shades each day so you can see at a glance whether it is Empty, Weekly, Custom or Closed.

Calendar settings

Each calendar has its own settings panel next to the availability view:

Enable overlapping appointments: allow more than one booking at the same time
Max overlapping: how many appointments can share a slot
Booking notification: the team members notified when the calendar is booked

Overlapping is what lets a group room take several patients at once, while a single exam room stays limited to one.

Practice calendars on your calendar

On the Clinician Calendar, the sidebar now filters by Practice calendars instead of by clinician. Add the calendars you want to see, hide the ones you don't, and use Set colors by in the toolbar to color events by Appointment type or by Practice calendar.

When you create an event, the Practice calendars field replaces the old clinician field, and at least one calendar is required. SigmaMD checks each one as you pick a time and warns you if a calendar is closed, outside its location, or already at its overlap limit.

Important considerations

A few things to keep in mind as you set calendars up:

A calendar with no availability can't be booked
A calendar only accepts events at its assigned location
Resources are set to inactive rather than deleted
Setting a resource to inactive cancels its future appointments
Affected patients are notified when that happens

To let patients book a resource themselves, turn on Bookable resources in the appointment type. See How to Configure Bookable Clinicians in Appointment Types for how that section works.

Best practices

To get the most out of practice calendars:

Give every bookable room and machine its own calendar
Set availability before you enable self-scheduling for it
Keep overlap limits equal to the real capacity
Add a booking notification recipient for shared resources
Review the Calendars list after adding a location

Practice calendars give every bookable part of your clinic a schedule of its own, so your team books the room, the equipment and the clinician in a single step.