Therapist Management, Schedules, Availability, and Client Visibility

Setting up a new Therapist

You can find a guide on setting up a new, or editing an existing, therapist in Zencare Practice Management here.

Setting up Therapist Schedules

When you add a Therapist to Zencare Practice Management you need to assign their availability. The availability states when the therapist is available to work, typically when they are available for client bookings. If you are using the Client Portal for booking, the availability determines when the clients will be able to book sessions with a given therapist.

If you wish to change the predefined availability for a therapist, this can be done by going to Settings, then Therapists, selecting a therapist, then selecting the Availability button that appears at the top of the screen.

There are two components to availability:

• General Availability: The overarching schedule of your hours on a weekly basis, your schedule for the long-term. It allows you to establish static, set hours on a weekly basis. For example, if you always work Monday to Friday 9:00am to 5:00pm.
• Specific Availability: A way of creating dynamic patterns in your scheduled hours. For example, if you typically work Monday to Friday 9:00am to 5:00pm, but have decided to also work Saturday afternoons for the next two months you could layer those hours into your Availability for the short-term. You can create patterns that will recur for a certain period of time and then end when needed, resuming the pattern established by General Availability.

You can use the General Availability to set your typical working hours and then use the Specific Availability as needed to create nuanced patterns for working hours that deviate from your standard hours. Specific Availability supports General Availability by allowing more flexibility in your schedule.

Setting up General Availability

You can select the days outlined in the General view to create blocks of working hours:

Simply choose the hours for the day, e.g. Monday working 9:00am until 8:00pm EST and select the Update button to save these hours to your schedule.

You can setup the General Availability however you wish, with long periods of time from the start of your day right through until the end, or with breaks in the day for split shifts.

You can do this by selecting a block of time and modifying the values for the start and end of availability.  You can also drag the top and bottom of a block to make changes if you wish.  

Setting up Specific Availability

Select the Specific button in the Availability window to open up the monthly view of your schedule

In the Specific Availability view, you will see your schedule for the current month and can select the arrows to navigate through the months as needed, or select the name of the month to open the calendar filter to choose dates farther into the future.

You will also see blocks of time within each of the days, which represents your General Availability. You can select one of these blocks to edit your availability for that specific day if needed. For instance, if you normally work Monday to Friday 9:00am to 5:00pm, you could click on the block for Tuesday November 6th and change the hours for that day only, to 10:00am to 4:00pm.

Selecting the Remove Slot button will remove the scheduled hours for this day specifically.

You can also select the white space of a day that doesn't have any scheduled working hours to add time to that day. Selecting the white space on a day that already has hours scheduled through General Availability will open a window with the hours automatically pre-populated following the end time of the hours currently booked. For example, if you select the white space on a day where you're already scheduled to work 9:00am to 5:00pm, you will be prompted to add another block of time starting at 5:00pm.

Setting up Recurrences

You can create recurrences in your specific availability as well. By clicking the Recurrence drop down menu, you'll see the option to set recurrences that happen Daily, Weekly, Bi-Weekly, Every 3 Weeks, and Every 4 Weeks. When you choose to create a recurrence, you'll be prompted to set an end date for it.

For example, you'll be working 11:00am until 3:30pm every week on Thursdays starting November 9th until February 1, 2019:

It is important to remember that the General Availability is the first layer of your schedule, and Specific is the second layer. Anything you input into Specific Availability will override your General Availability for the period of time you choose. Once that period has ended, the General Availability resumes automatically, without you having to make any changes.

If you select a recurrence that has already been scheduled, you can edit it. The existing Recurrence will be shown, e.g. Weekly but you'll need to define a new end date for any recurrence that you wish to edit.

Service Specific Availability

Service availability can be used to determine when certain services are bookable by date. This is helpful for practices that use Zencare's Client Portal and want to restrict clients from booking a particular service on a certain day of the week.

For instance, if you only do couples sessions on the weekends, you wouldn't want a client to be able to book themselves for this service on a Wednesday. You can configure the couples session as only available on Saturday and Sunday.  To begin, go to Services and Fees under Settings, select a service, select Edit at the top, and under Availability select the times you wish for the service to be available.

Viewing Availability in the Calendar

Viewing all of the therapist working hours on specific days can be done through the Calendar using the Availability View. Simply select the Clock Icon in the Calendar:

The Calendar will display for a specific day by therapist. This is a read only view that lets you see when the therapist is booked in client sessions, personal sessions, or when they've blocked off time in their schedule as Unavailable, meaning that they are working but not to be scheduled for client sessions.

Any therapists you select from the sidebar on the left will be added into your view. You can view as many therapists as you wish, in as many varied combinations. The areas displayed in white show the therapist's availability for that day and the areas displayed in gray show the hours that the therapist is not working. All of the events in this view have been clearly labeled as Client, Personal, or Unavailable.

To schedule a period of time when a therapist is working, but not intending to be client facing, you can create an Unavailable event type. From the Day, Week, or Month views of the Calendar, simply select an empty space to open the Create Session window. From the Event Type drop down menu, choose the Unavailable event type:

You can input a Reason for Unavailability, e.g. Research. You can also specify a Location, e.g. My Office and assign a Room if needed. You can create recurrences for Unavailable event types if needed and add any comments that might be important for clinic staff to know.

Unavailable event types function the same way that Personal event types do, they are meant to put a block of time in the Therapist's schedule when they are not available for client sessions. Personal events should be used for sick days, vacations, lunch breaks, etc. Unavailable events can be used to represent working hours when the therapist cannot be client-facing. For instance, if they are working on research, need to provide supervision for another professional, or are participating in a conference.

Client Types Available to Book

When creating or updating an existing therapist, you can see the type of client that is able to book this therapist from their Client Portal account under the Client Types Available to Book section. By making a selection in the the drop down menu the therapist's booking availability is determined.

The available options are:

•  All Clients: The therapist is visible to all clients, new and existing, no matter if a client has been associated with the therapist, regardless if the Client Portal account has been created.
• Existing clients only: The therapist is visible only to clients with a validated Client Portal account and established in the Clinic Portal.  They are not visible to new clients or available for booking for clients without first being signed in.
• Only clients associated to this therapist: The therapist visible only to clients who have the therapist set as the Primary Therapist or Other Therapist in the Clients under Client Details 

• None: The therapist is not visible for any user type in the Client Portal.