Anytime the same support question comes in from three different locations around the country in the same week, that tells me it’s time for a tutorial 🙂
I am really excited to write this post because the subject of it tells me two things:
#1 Our customers are wanting to maximize their use of their Practice-Web software.
#2 Their appointment schedules are filling up and they are looking for ways to better manage their time so they can be even more productive.
Yes, Practice-Web has a feature that can definitely help you with this! They’re called Blockouts and this blog will show you how they work.
Blockouts are different from your hours of operation. You can see in the example image, my hours of operation are 8am to 5pm. The time in which I would like to schedule appointments is white. The time in which I am not seeing appointments is grey. (Side Note: You can set your time open vs. time closed as any color you want). Within my open hours, you see the Blockouts. For this example, I have four different Blockout types high production, emergencies, recall, and hygiene. The Blockouts are set within my hours of operation so my staff knows when to schedule the different types of appointments. Notice I put high production (endo and surgeries) in the morning. I decided to put that Blockout type there so not only does my staff and patient not feel rushed during the day, but if there is a complication after the patient is sent home it doesn’t turn into an after-hours emergency. I would rather perform routine care towards the end of the day so that way we can schedule children after school appointments, adults after work appointments, etc. Let’s be realistic, if an adult is coming in for a root canal they are missing work that day anyway, so why not schedule those appointments in the morning. Am I right? All kidding aside, I hope you can see the purpose of the Blockouts.
The Blockout types are fully customizable for your individual practice. You can create your own names, colors and you can place them on the schedule based on how you would like to schedule your patients. Are the solid Blockouts a little too much? If you don’t want your schedule to look like a game of Tetris then you can use the blockouts as just an outline and still achieve the same effect.
To help you with the process of creating your Blockouts we created a video tutorial just for you. You can click here to watch it. If you would like more assistance with the Blockouts or how to set them up don’t hesitate to call support at 800-845-9379 opt 2.
Until next time 😉