Overview

Scheduling an appointment is defined as the process by which the Patient chooses the most convenient date/time for their appointment. There are several ways this can be achieved.

You can try out the different scheduling methods using test mode.

For Organisations using the Ally dashboard to manage appointments

Appointments that are created using the dashboard use the create appointment stepper flow as detailed here.

In the "scheduling" step there are two choices:

1. Ask the patient (aka "Patient-led scheduling")
   1. Choosing this option means that the Ally platform will send an Email and SMS to the Patient to ask them to select a convenient date and time using a mobile first micro website
   2. If the patient has not chosen a date and time they will receive a reminder the next day (ie. appointment creation date + 1) and on appointment creation date + 3
   3. These reminder messages can be seen on the appointment timeline in the dashboard
   4. If the Patient has not selected a date and time after the two reminders were sent, then Ally Operations will proactively contact the Patient
   5. The Patient is able to directly contact Ally support through the micro website to correct issues with their address or contact information
2. Choose a time
   1. Your internal operations team can choose the date and time for the appointment. This is useful if the patient is already on the phone or in contact with you, and you are re-scheduling their appointment with them.

For Organisations that integrate with the Ally platform API

This guide explains the step by step process for creating an appointment via the API.

The recommended method to enable scheduling through the Ally API is to present your customer with a date/time picker to select the appointment time directly in your system or interface. The guide referenced above explains how our Availability API returns windows that may be selected by your user, and then subsequently used to create an appointment.

If you wish to use the "patient-led scheduling" service via the API you may do this by creating an appointment (via a POST to /v1/appointments) without a windowId specified. This will cause the Ally system to trigger the patient led scheduling workflow and set the status of the appointment to "scheduling."