Appointment Types

Within each Appointment Category are more specific Appointment Types. For example, under the Appointment Category “Patient Care,” you might have appointment types such as new patient, established patient, well visit, follow-up, and procedure. It is up to each practice to determine its Appointment Types, but a good rule of thumb is that they are descriptive enough to determine what the rules should be regarding how they’re scheduled, yet not so specific as to necessitate creating an unmanageable number of different ones. There will be a “free text” area to give more specifics for each appointment.

Below is an example of a practice set up with some of the most common Appointment Types (sorted by category). Note that unlike many of the other tables, double-clicking on a row will not open a separate window in which to enter data; all data is entered directly to each row of the table by tabbing through the fields.

• Type: Easily understood key or ID of the Appointment Type.
• Description: Brief, descriptive identifier of the Appointment Type.
• Category: Select from drop-down (based on the Appointment Category table you created earlier.)
• Global: Select if it applies to all resources.
• Blocked: Appointment Types (usually administrative) that block scheduling for the selected period of time