Dr. Jeremy Sharp (01:22)
Hey folks, welcome back to the podcast. Today is a business episode, but it is a specific business episode, a different kind of business episode. Trying a little experiment here, where I’m gonna do just a brief episode focusing on one specific tip to help you run your practice a little bit smoother. So today we’re gonna talk about a software tip, but it could be any number of things that happen from day to day that you can implement in your practice.
Without too much effort, that should save you quite a bit of time or at least improve the quality of your practice. So today we are going to be focusing on automated scheduling. So this is a software tip that it’s it’s one of the many things I found that
I have done over the years and realized that not everyone implements this practice, but it is so simple and it can save you a ton of time.
So this is a tip aimed at helping you save the back and forth of scheduling collateral calls and meetings and things like that. So if you’ve ever had that problem where you propose a few times and the person up at the back and says, those don’t work for me, how about these times? And then you say, those times don’t work for me. How about these times? And before you know it, you’re seven or eight emails deep and still haven’t found a time that works for the two of you. So that’s what we’re trying to solve today. So without further ado, I’m gonna
Jump into this discussion of automated scheduling software.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (03:02)
Alright, folks, we are back for the main episode here. Now, this is gonna be a pretty brief episode. I’m really just gonna dive in and demonstrate this tool that I’m talking about and have a little bit of a discussion, but the point is that you have something quick and easy to take away. So that’s gonna be the point of these business boost episodes. All right, so today I’m talking about automated scheduling, like I said in the intro. The problem, again, we’re trying to solve here is cutting.
Cutting out that back and forth to schedule things. All right. So this could be theoretically, it could be clinical appointments, but I typically use this strategy for booking collateral calls and other meetings that happen within the practice or within my consulting business. So one of my least favorite things to do is to go back and forth over email. Somebody proposes some times.
I’m like, I can’t do those. I’m booked like months and months out. Like, here are my little windows of time. So just check out my calendar. So this is essentially doing that thing where you have availability already set on your calendar and you just send people a link to your calendar to let them choose the time that works for them instead of having to go back and forth over and over and over. So there are many tools that you can use to do this. Now you will see that I am on.
Google Calendar because I use Google Workspace for all of my businesses. And I like Google Calendar. It integrates well with Gmail and all the other workspace tools. So I’m gonna demonstrate how to do it in Google Calendar. But before I jump to that, I wanna acknowledge there are equivalents. So Microsoft or Outlook has let’s see, I think it’s bookings with me.
And there’s also Microsoft Bookings. both of those are options within Outlook depending on what kind of meetings you’re trying to schedule. I think Bookings with me is more for personal scheduling and booking or Microsoft Bookings is for business and teams. So either way, both tools let you create a you know booking schedule and give people the link. If you want to
Go outside of your email and file management system, that being Google or Microsoft. you could look at a tool like Acuity. Acuity is a HIPAA compliant scheduling tool that’s really built around calendaring and schedules. So notice I said HIPAA compliant. you may not need that in this tool, but I’m a fan of streamlining systems and software as much as possible. And so, you know.
If you’re gonna use the software for scheduling one type of meeting, you might as well be able to use it to schedule other types of meetings, by which I mean client appointments. So you know, you could look outside and do an add-on tool like a cuity, like I said, but that would be an extra piece of software for most of us. So I prefer not to go that route.
The other thing here is that many EEHRs will do this as well. you can create a specific type of appointment in your EHR and then set it up so that it is self-scheduling, you know, so people can book on their own. And you should be able to generate a unique link. I know that Intake Q does this, I believe Simple Practice does this. let’s see, many other EHRs will also do this. So
Check your EHR first. And if you can’t do it in your EHR, then come to your calendar system. The reason I’m doing it here in Google Calendar is because this is one of those few features that Therapy Notes does not offer in the way that I would like it to be implemented yet. So we do use Therapy Notes for our EHR, love it, but this is one of those features that it just doesn’t have yet.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (09:30)
All right, so let’s get to this. You can see my screen. if you’re just listening right now, know that there is an accompanying YouTube video where I’m actually walking through the process of creating this booking schedule so you can see it, you can see it live and bring it to life a little bit. So what I’m gonna do, so I am basically in my Google Calendar window. And in Google, at least, there is a button up in the top left corner that says create.
You’re gonna Click that drop down, and you’re gonna get the options to create an event, a task, an out of office time, focus time, which I like. We could talk about that a different time, working location or appointment schedule. And appointment schedule is the magic option here. So we’re gonna create an appointment schedule. And what this does essentially is give you the opportunity to create a schedule,
That matches your availability for that particular type of meetings. Let’s say that we are creating an appointment schedule for collateral patient calls. All right. So these are going to be calls that you make or receive from other providers, you know, people involved in your patient’s care. So partners, parents, teachers, providers, etc. All right.
So, you get to choose the appointment duration. I’m typically doing 15 minutes for those collateral calls, but maybe you want to set it for 30 minutes just to give yourself a little extra time. then you can come in, you can choose the days of the week and the times that you prefer to offer for these calls. Now, you don’t have to be super specific, you can just specify a window of time, and then they can choose within that window which times they want.
So, let’s say let’s see. So my clinical days are Mondays and Wednesdays. So I’m gonna delete Tuesdays and Thursdays from the schedule. I also don’t like to work on Fridays a whole lot. So I’m just gonna leave Monday to Monday and Wednesday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. got your time zone. You can pick a scheduling window typically. So you can say, you know, this starts like
When this starts, you can do start and end dates if you want to, if you have like a limited run of appointments. So we use this option to schedule APIC internship interviews in January. It’s a limited run. Maximum time in advance, an appointment can be booked. I preferred, I would set this at like 30. You can do it whatever you want though.
And then minimum time before the appointments start that it can be booked. Now be really careful with this. if you don’t want appointments showing up on your calendar right off the bat, like instantaneously, then set this to, I mean, for me, I like 24 hours. Let’s see, you can adjust your availability typically with any of these tools for a specific date. You’re gonna have some booked appointment settings, so you can give yourself buffer time between.
Between appointments, let’s just say I like 15 minutes between my appointments. You can see it adjusting on the screen over here where it creates these these windows of time with a little 15-minute buffer. You can do a maximum bookings per day. that can be super helpful. and then you know, guest permissions, let’s see, calendars. That’s gonna choose you’re gonna choose which calendar you want the appointment to show up on and which calendars to check.
For availability. So this is handy if you have multiple Google Calendars synced in the same place. You can select multiple calendars. And then co-host, you can add co-hosts if you need them. So I’m going to hit next. All right, booking page photo and name. So if you have a photo uploaded in Google Calendar, it’s going to show up automatically. Let’s see, you can choose your location, whether you want this to be in person, a phone call, or a virtual meeting.
Or you can choose none and you will specify later. So I’m typically doing Google Meet video conferencing. So you can add a description. I’m just gonna type in collateral phone calls.
You can do a booking form. So this is where the you get to choose what information the person enters. First name, last name, email. You can add items. So there’s phone number, there’s custom. If you choose custom, you can specify the question that you want to add. All right, payment. You can do payment. I don’t, but you know, you could if you were trying to set this up as a more robust booking system for your business.
You can add a cancellation policy. So you can see that they’re really trying to build this out for you know a legitimate business that’s charging for services. And then booking confirmation and reminder. So send a calendar invite, always do that. Do an email reminder one day before. You can also add a reminder, let’s say, to do 10 minutes before. Actually, I like an hour. That gives people time. Okay, then you hit save. All right, great. Great. So
Let’s see, it looks like my calendar reset back to. Okay, so now you can see the way that this shows up in Google, a couple different ways. You have your booking pages over on the left hand side. you can click into the booking page to edit the settings. And then if you want to confirm that the booking page is live, you can go onto your calendar and you see this little icon with the bar going down.
The side on the date that shows you that you are available. And now the last page here or sorry, the last step here is to send out the link. So you can hover over the booking page. There’s this copy link option. You can also come in here and there’s a copy link option. So you want to you can copy the link to your booking page, and then you can
Generate you know, email or whatever text with that link. So you copy the link and then you send it out to folks as you see fit as you schedule your appointments. So, like I said, this is meant to be super simple. it has saved a ton of time over the years, it eliminates that back and forth with scheduling. So now when someone reaches out,
Asking to book a meeting, or if I need to reach out and book a collateral phone call for an evaluation or something like that, I just send them my calendar link and say, hey, jump on my calendar, pick a time that works for you, and I’ll talk to you then. So super easy, but one of those overlooked options that people can go years without implementing.
As you can see here though, this is like a five-minute setup and it’ll save you a ton time. If you want to go the extra mile, I would I would you know set up something like a text expander or you know some tool like that where you can copy the link and then create a shortcut. So all you have to do is type you know dot calendar link or something like that or x calendar link and it will populate automatically so you don’t have to go back and copy you know manually copy that link every single time.
All right, folks, simple tip here. Like I said, I’m gonna be doing more of these business boost episodes where I just talk through a simple piece of software or strategy that shouldn’t take more than five or ten minutes to implement and should give you kind of an outsize return on your effort to set that up. So hope you enjoyed it, and happy scheduling.
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