Let patients book while you sleep
Online Appointment Requests is the booking flow patients use on your public page. It guides them step by step — choosing a clinic, a doctor and a time — and delivers a tidy request to your team to confirm.
What it does
- Walks the patient through a simple, guided booking in a few clear steps.
- Lets them pick the clinic, the doctor and a preferred time.
- Asks the patient to agree to the Terms of Use and the Privacy Policy on the final step, and records the date and time they did — so consent is captured with the request rather than assumed.
- Sends the request to your staff for review and confirmation.
- Emails the patient a warm welcome with their own secure personal portal — reached by a private link and a scannable QR code — where they can follow their booking and appointment status, message the clinic, view billing and upload a payment receipt, complete any intake forms, and download their documents when ready.
- Keeps the patient updated by email at every step: their request being confirmed or cancelled, and their appointment being confirmed, completed or cancelled — with the secure portal link and QR carried along each time.
- Gives the same portal to visits your own staff book: ticking Online Appointment on the booking form emails the patient their link and QR right then, so a patient who never used the public page still attends online (see the Appointments guide).
- The QR code in those emails is a small picture hosted at the patient's own secure link rather than image data pasted into the message, because Gmail, Outlook and most phones hide pasted-in images and patients would otherwise see a broken box. The picture only ever shows the same link the email already carries, and it is kept by the patient's mail app or browser until the link expires, so it is not re-downloaded each time the email is opened. Once the link has expired or been revoked, a fresh request for the picture is refused; a copy already kept on the patient's device may still display until it lapses. The plain Open your appointment portal button and the printed link sit next to it, so a patient whose mail app blocks images can still get in.
- Protects privacy: opening the portal asks for a one-time code emailed for that visit, and the secure link automatically expires 72 hours after the appointment is completed — the patient is emailed to let them know when it has.
- Keeps the record honest: the patient can add to their visit — uploads, messages, questionnaire answers — from the moment it is booked until the moment you complete it, so they can send documents ahead without waiting to be confirmed. Completing the visit fixes the record so nothing can be changed after the fact. If something needs to be added late, re-open the visit from the appointment page and the patient's existing link starts working again.
- Can be switched off when you need it. Turn online booking off from Settings → Public Visibility and the booking form closes: every "Book" button disappears from your public page, and anyone who reaches the form is shown your own message instead. Write that message yourself, or leave it blank and a sensible default is used. Requests already submitted, and the secure links patients are holding, keep working — only new requests stop.
Switching online booking off
Two places can close the form, and they are the same switch:
- Settings → Public Visibility in your clinic, beside the public directory listing. You own this one.
- The Platform Admin's tenant settings page, for support to close it on your behalf if you cannot reach your own settings. You can turn it straight back on.
While it is off:
- The "Book" buttons are gone from your home page, doctor and service pages, packages and the availability calendar — nobody is sent to a form that will not take them.
- The booking form itself, at every step, shows your message along with your phone number, email and address, so a patient who bookmarked it still knows how to reach you.
- Your listing on the public portal shows the message too, rather than a button into a closed form.
- Everything else on your public page carries on — doctors, services, prices, opening hours.
- Your appointment-request inbox, and the secure portal links patients already have, are untouched.
The default message reads:
Online booking is temporarily unavailable. Please call or visit the clinic to schedule an appointment — we are still accepting patients.
Write your own if the reason matters — a holiday, a system upgrade, a fully-booked month — and say how patients should reach you instead.
Copying people on booking emails
A clinic can name extra recipients to be copied (CC) on its booking emails from Settings → Booking Email Copies. It is one list that applies to all of them: the new-request alert to the clinic, the new-request email to the doctor, and the patient's welcome, confirmation, cancellation and status-change emails.
- Clinic users. Tick any active user. Their current account email is used at send time, so the copy follows an email change and drops out if the account is closed or suspended.
- Other addresses. Type any address, one per line, up to ten. An invalid address blocks the save and nothing is changed.
- Nobody is copied on a message already addressed to them, and duplicates are collapsed.
- The list is empty by default, so existing clinics see no change.
- A copy that cannot be resolved is skipped and logged without patient data; it never stops the booking email itself.
The emails name the patient and include appointment details and the patient's portal link, so the page warns the clinic to add only people who should see them.
Operators: migration platform/067_email_queue_cc.sql adds email_queue.cc_addresses; run it before the code ships, because the queue now writes that column on every message. Then clear the container cache (rm -rf storage/cache/container-*). The CC list lives in the tenant's settings JSON under booking_email_cc; no tenant migration is needed.
Why it helps
For the clinic
Bookings can come in around the clock, not just during office hours, helping you capture patients who would otherwise call a competitor or give up.
For doctors
Requests are matched to the right doctor and specialty, so the schedule fills with appropriate visits.
For staff
Instead of juggling phone calls, the front desk reviews neat requests in the system and confirms them with a click.
For patients
They book on their own schedule, from any device, and get a secure personal portal to follow everything about their visit in one place — with clear email updates at every step so they are never left wondering.
Your team is always in control. A request is only a request until staff confirm it, so the clinic decides what actually goes on the calendar.