Problem: Sometimes clinics who are using the OSCAR Schedule Template sync advise that the synced schedule seems inconsistent with OSCAR. In particular, a physician is available on a day they aren’t “on the schedule”.

Discussion: The OSCAR Schedule Template system, while quite robust, is surprisingly complicated. We aren’t experts, but we’ll try to do our best to explain what is the most common explanation for this issue.

In the first screenshot to the right, certain days are yellow, meaning the physician has been marked as AVAILABLE (see the second screenshot). Other days are blue, meaning the physician has been marked as UNAVAILABLE (see the third screenshot).

The effect of this configuration, in OSCAR, is that when viewing a physician’s week calendar, by default, the days the physician is marked UNAVAILABLE do not show up (see the fourth screenshot).

However, if you pay close attention to the blue days, you’ll see that it’s possible that a template is still configured for that day (see the third screenshot).

The impact of this becomes apparent if you click on the “All”, to see all days of the week (see the fifth screenshot).

In the sixth screenshot, you’ll notice that all days of the week actually have the appointment time slot codes applied, despite being technically marked as UNAVAILABLE.

Solution: The best approach is to change the template on the days the physician is not available to a template that does NOT have the codes that Veribook is using to identify timeslots available for online scheduling.

For example, choose a template that is entirely blank, instead of one that shares the codes that Veribook is watching for. Big picture, Veribook does not look at the AVAILABLE vs. UNAVAILABLE flag, our system only searches for the appointment slot coding.

If this seems too complicated (which we get), your alternative is to simply add a Do Not Book into the clinician’s schedule, to block them out of the schedule that day (see the seventh screenshot).