The Appointment Intervals in your Appointment Book dictate the length of each available time slot for each of your doctors. While there are settings available in both the Appointment Preferences and User Preferences for Appointment Intervals, these work in different ways.
Before you begin
You may also find Appointment Scheduling useful when structuring your Appointment Book. If you don't already have these set up and they interest you, please refer to the Appointment Schedules article for more information.
To set your Appointment Intervals for your entire practice navigate to Appts > Appt Preferences. Using the Interval dropdown, select the interval option you would like to apply to your Appointment Book. This will apply to the All tab of your Appointment Book and for any users who have Global selected in their User Preferences.
It's very common for providers within a single practice to have different preferences or needs when it comes to how long their appointments are.
To set Appointment Intervals for each individual user, navigate to File > All User Preferences and then double click to open the profile for your chosen user. Navigate to the General tab and within the Appointments section on the right, you will notice the Appt Interval drop down. If this is set to Use Global, this user's intervals will mimic what is set in Appointment Preferences. Any other option selected in this drop down will apply to this user only.
If you choose to make changes to your Appointment Intervals, either in Appointment Preferences (Global) or User Preferences (user specific), it will not change the length of your existing appointments. However, it will update the Appointment Book retrospectively.
When changing your Appointment Intervals, you may also wish to consider updating the default length of your Appointment Types. To do this select the Type drop down at the top of your Appointment Book and select the option for Modify. You will then receive a Modify Appointment Types window with a list of your existing Appointment Types. Select your chosen Appointment Type and you will see the dedicated colour and Number of Appt Slots it uses. These appointment slots will need to be updated to conform with your Appointment Intervals as it is not possible to set a specific minute length for these types.
For example, if you have set your Appointment Intervals to 15 minutes, but your New Patient appointments need to run for 30 minutes, then you will need to adjust the New Patient Appointment Type to run for 2 Appt Slots.
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