Appointment templates

A template is a provider's working pattern for one day of the week: when they start, when they finish, and how long an appointment takes.

Templates are maintained in Administration → Appointment Template Editor, not on the Appointment screen.

Templates do not drive the staff calendar

The Appointment screen is a fixed 6:00 AM to 10:00 PM grid in 15-minute slots, and it books happily with no template at all. Templates feed the online booking page — the times a patient sees when they book themselves in.

So a provider with no template still works normally at the front desk, but offers no appointments online. That is the symptom to look for.

The provider must exist and be Active in the Provider catalog before a template can be built for them.

Building a day

Templates are per provider, per day of the week. Each day can look completely different — a provider working late on Thursdays and half of Saturday is three separate templates.

Field	What it sets
Provider	Whose schedule this is
Day of week	Sunday through Saturday
Time	Minutes per appointment slot — up to 180, in 5-minute steps
Slot	How many appointments allowed per interval
Morning	Start and end of the morning block
Afternoon	Start and end of the afternoon block
Potential Patient Slots	How many slots a prospective patient's first visit takes

Tick morning, afternoon, or both.

Interval and slots

Base the interval on how long you actually spend with a patient.

Prefer short intervals with one slot each

A 15-minute interval with 3 slots and a 5-minute interval with 1 slot both allow three patients per quarter hour — but the second gives each of them a real time, and shows you honestly what the day looks like. One slot per interval is the recommended setup.

Potential Patient Slots

A prospective patient's first visit is longer than a routine one. This says how many slots to consume — with a 5-minute interval and a 40-minute initial visit, set it to 8.

Generating the day

Building a template is a two-stage process, so you can review before committing:

1. Set the interval, slots and the morning/afternoon blocks
2. Generate — produces the candidate times under Schedule Templates
3. Review them, and adjust and regenerate as often as you like
4. Add the times you want, or Add All, moving them into Review, Edit and Save Daily Schedule
5. Review the saved list — individual times can still be removed
6. Save

The schedule isn't real until you save

Generating produces a proposal. Regenerating is free and non-destructive. Saving is what creates bookable times, and a save replaces that day's list rather than adding to it.

Start early, finish late

Set the day to begin 15–30 minutes before you open and end 15–30 minutes after you close. Those few extra slots at each end are what absorb the emergency, the patient who arrives late, and the one who needs to be seen before work.

Overbooking

Nothing prevents double-booking

There is no availability check and no overbooking permission anywhere in ChiroPad. Any user can put any number of patients in the same slot, on the calendar or through a recurring series, and nothing warns them.

That is a matter for practice policy and for reviewing the day's diary, not something the software will enforce.

Staff actions for missed appointments

The same editor holds the list of staff actions used when resolving a missed appointment — the reasons staff pick from, each with a description, a default reminder interval, and a default status of Open, Reschedule, Missed or Staff Error.

Check the default status on each action

An action whose default status is anything other than Open silently drops the patient off the MIA list when chosen. That is correct for Reschedule: Patient agreed to reschedule and wrong for Phoned: No Answer — and the difference is invisible at the moment staff pick from the list.

Options

Only Active Providers limits the provider list to active ones, and Sort By orders it by provider ID or by provider name.