Troubleshooting Patient Self-Scheduling Issues in the SigmaMD Patient Mobile App

If a patient is unable to find availability for self-scheduling in the SigmaMD mobile app, there may be several reasons. Below are the possible causes and how to resolve them.

Check for existing events blocking availability

Any appointment or other event on the clinician's SigmaMD calendar prevents self-scheduling during those times. Blocks also prevent self-scheduling if the "Block calendar" option is turned on.

This includes external calendar events. Google or Microsoft events sync with SigmaMD and block availability. If needed, disconnect all external calendars to eliminate conflicts and ensure availability for patient self-scheduling. To check or adjust external calendar settings, go to external calendar settings.

Verify working hours and shifts

The clinician may not have enabled working hours, or they may be set incorrectly.
Shifts may be configured to exclude specific visit or appointment types, which can limit availability.

Important:

If you add new appointment types in Practice settings, you must manually enable them per shift in Working hours.
Don't forget to click Save below the shift list for your changes to take effect.

To check or update working hours and shifts, go to working hours settings.

Verify the settings for each appointment type

Open your appointment settings to ensure all configurations are correct for each appointment type. Click Edit next to each appointment type to review its settings.

Creating a new appointment type

Go to Appointment types in your practice settings.
Click Add appointment type.
Enter the name and optional description.
Choose a color, duration, and buffer time.
(Optional) Assign a clinic location and a default resource, such as a room or equipment.

These fields help your team standardize how each visit should be handled.

Restricting an appointment type to a specific location

To control where an appointment type appears, use the Clinic locations setting within the appointment configuration. Select only the clinic(s) where this appointment should be available. Avoid using All locations unless the appointment is intended to be offered across your entire clinic. If patients from one clinic are seeing an appointment type that doesn't apply to them, set it to the correct clinic to remove it from the wrong patients' scheduling view.

Choosing Bookable Clinicians

You can control which clinicians are available for each appointment type:

All clinicians — The appointment type is available for every clinician.
Patient assigned clinician — Patients can only book this visit with the clinician assigned to their chart.
Selected clinicians — Choose one or more clinicians who can be booked for this appointment type.

This makes it easy to restrict certain visit types to specific providers or specialties.

Setting Visit Types

Each appointment type can support one or more visit modalities: in-clinic, at-home, video, or phone. Patients see only the visit types your clinic supports for that specific appointment.

Self-scheduling settings to check

Ensure Patient self-scheduling is turned on.
Earliest and latest scheduling periods determine how soon and how far ahead patients can book. For example, an earliest period of 1 hour allows same-day bookings with notice; a latest period of 2 weeks limits booking to two weeks ahead.
Availability depends on the appointment type's availability setting and the patient's past appointments:
- All visits — always available, regardless of past appointments.
- First visit only — available only if the patient has no prior appointments. Archived, Canceled, or No show appointments don't count as prior, and patients imported from a previous EMR are excluded.
- After first visit only — available only if the patient has at least one prior appointment. Archived, Canceled, or No show appointments don't count, and imported patients are treated as existing patients.
Patient memberships — ensure the patient matches the membership requirements. If an appointment type uses a membership filter and the patient chose a future membership start date, their membership is set to Deferred and they can't self-schedule until it becomes Active.
Bookable clinicians — ensure the correct clinicians are set as bookable and have working hours and shifts set correctly (see "Verify working hours and shifts" above).