Scenario #1: Patients who schedule multiple appointments on the same day, usually because they want more time with their physician to address multiple issues.

Solution / Recommendation: By default for most clinics, we automatically configure a setting in our system to limit any given patient to a maximum of one appointment per day per clinician. Once a first appointment has been booked (whether online or in person or by phone), a second appointment cannot be booked online for the same day with the same clinician.

Adjustments are possible (e.g. making it so that it’s appointment per day across the board, instead of per clinician)

Scenario #2: Patients who schedule extra appointments on subsequent/multiple days, usually to "place a hold” on an appointment slot.

Solution / Recommendation: In almost all situations, we find that this is generally only a problem for a handful of patients (e.g. less than 20 for an entire clinic)

As such, our strong recommendation is to speak to those patients directly to advise them that their approach is problematic, and that if they persist, they will not be permitted to continue to book appointments online.

We recommend this more personalized and direct approach (as opposed to implementing some sort of global “max 1 appointments per month” rule) because applying a more stringent rule to the whole population of patients will introduce bigger problems.

If patients persist, instructions are here #5 for how to block specific patients from booking online.