Guidance for configuring advanced appointment scheduling for a vaccination center

  • Release version: Washingtondc
  • Updated February 1, 2024
  • 5 minutes to read
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    Summary of Guidance for Configuring Advanced Appointment Scheduling for a Vaccination Center

    The configuration for advanced appointment scheduling allows administrators to set appointment durations, daily and holiday schedules, and determine available slots and capacity for vaccination centers. Careful management of these settings is crucial, as changes can impact both existing and future appointments. This guidance outlines specific recommendations to avoid unintended consequences when configuring appointment scheduling.

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    Key Features

    • Appointment Duration: Changing this after appointments are created can lead to overbooking. For example, altering the appointment window from 5 minutes to 10 minutes can result in overlapping slots.
    • Holiday Schedule: New holidays should not be added if there are existing appointments, as this will invalidate those appointments.
    • Lead Time: This value can be modified without affecting existing appointments.
    • Daily Schedule Adjustments: Daily start and end times should not be modified when appointments exist, as this can create overbooked slots.
    • Bookable Days: New days can be added, but removing days with existing appointments will invalidate those bookings.
    • Daily Breaks: The break settings should not be altered if it may disrupt existing scheduled appointments.

    Key Outcomes

    By adhering to these guidelines, administrators can maintain a stable appointment system, ensuring that existing bookings remain valid while allowing for necessary configuration changes. Proper management of the scheduling settings will enhance the efficiency of vaccination centers and improve user experience by minimizing appointment conflicts.

    Advanced appointment scheduling configuration enables administrators to configure appointment durations, daily schedule, holiday schedule, and so on. This configuration is used to identify the available slots as well as a location’s capacity for a given day and enable users to select appointment slots based on the parameters that you configure.

    Be mindful that changing some of the configuration values for a finalized vaccination center configuration can have undesired side effects on both existing and future appointments.

    The following forms and tables provide some helpful guidance for handling advanced appointment scheduling configurations for a vaccination center and some of the impacts of making certain changes. However, this guidance does not address an exhaustive list of all possible side effects.

    Figure 1. Vaccination Appointment Configuration form
    Vaccination Appointment Configuration form with various fields to fill. For information on the fields available on the form, see the Vaccination Appointment Configuration form section that follows.
    Table 1. Vaccination Appointment Configuration form

    Field

    Recommendation and Impact

    Name

    You can change the name field without causing undesired side effects.

    Description

    You can change the description field without causing undesired side effects.

    Holiday schedule

    Do not add a new holiday schedule when there are existing appointments in the current location. It invalidates existing appointments. Do not add more holidays to the existing holiday schedule. New holidays may already contain booked appointments.

    Appointment duration
    • Do not modify the appointment duration when appointments have already been created in the current location.
    • Impact: Changing the total capacity of a location causes overlapping slots that result in overbooked appointments.
    • For example:
      1. In your old configuration, if the appointment window was 5 minutes, the daily schedule would have looked like: 9:00 to 9:05, 9:05 to 9:10, 9:10 to 9:15, and 9:15 to 9:20. In this configuration, you have appointments booked from 9:00 to 9:05 and from 9:05 to 9:10, and appointments available from 9:10 to 9:15 and from 9:15 to 9:20.
      2. If you create a new configuration with an appointment window of 10 minutes, then your daily schedule would look like: 9 to 9:10, 9:10 to 9:20 with available slots from 9:10 to 9:20, and actual slots are displayed in the same 10-minute increments.
      3. The configuration change causes an overbooking in the 9:00 to 9:10 slot, because it was booked for two appointments in the previous configuration.

    Lead time

    You can change the lead time value without impacting any existing appointments.

    Future bookable max days
    • Do not decrease the value because appointments may have been booked on the last day in the current location. Decreasing the value invalidates appointments booked on the last day.
    • You can increase the value without impacting any existing appointments.

    Reschedule or cancel by time
    • You can conditionally change the value.
    • If there is any work flow that impacts existing appointments or users, it is not safe to change the value.

    Active
    • Do not deactivate the configuration when there are existing appointments. It invalidates existing appointments.
    • You can activate the previously inactive configuration without impacting any appointments.
    Figure 2. Vaccination Schedule form
    Vaccination Schedule form with various fields to fill. For information on the fields available here, see the Vaccination Appointment Configuration form section that follows.
    Table 2. Vaccination Schedule form

    Field

    Recommendation and Impact

    Name

    You can change the name field without causing undesired side effects.

    Start date
    • Do not increase the value because appointments may be booked between the old start date and the new start date. Increasing the value invalidates appointments booked between the old start date and the new start date.
    • You can decrease the value only when there are no overlapped slots configured in the other schedule under the same appointment configuration.
    • For example:
      1. Say that your old schedule has a start date of April 8, 2021 and bookable days from Monday to Friday from 09:00 to 18:00.
      2. Suppose that you created another schedule under the same appointment configuration which has a start and end date of March 1, 2021 to March 31, 2021.
      3. Now, if you change the schedule start date to March 31, 2021, it creates an overlapped bookable slot with the existing schedule on March 31, 2021 and the system will create an error.

    End date
    • Do not decrease the value because appointments may be booked between the new end date and the old end date. Increasing the value invalidates appointments booked between the new end date and the old end date.
    • You can increase the value only when there are no overlapped slots configured in the other schedule under the same appointment configuration.

    Appointments per window
    • Do not set the number of appointments per window to 0.
    • You can increase the number of appointments per window.
    • Do not decrease the number of appointments per window for a service configuration when appointments have already been created.
    • Impact: Reducing the total number of appointments per window results in overbooked appointments per slot for the appointments that were created before the change.
    • For example:
      1. Old configuration: You had 4 appointments per window. If the total number of windows = 2, then your total capacity is 2*4, or 8. If you had 4 appointments created per slot, the total capacity used is 4*2, or 8.
      2. New configuration: You have 2 appointments per window. If you have two total windows, then your new total capacity is 2*2, or 4. But if you had 4 appointments already created per slot (based on a past configuration), then your total capacity is 4*2, or 8.
      3. With this configuration, the total capacity, 8, exceeds the new total capacity of 4, causing overbooked appointments.

    Daily start time

    Do not modify the daily start time when appointments are already present. Modification creates overbooked slots and invalidates previous appointments.

    Daily end time
    • You can increase the daily end time. The increase is only valid when the appointment duration and daily start values are not changed.
    • Do not make the daily end time earlier when appointments are already present. Doing so creates overbooked slots and invalidates previous appointments.

    Bookable days
    • You can add days without impacting existing appointments.
    • Removing the bookable days when appointments have already been created invalidates past appointments.
    • For example:
      1. In your old configuration, suppose that Saturday is bookable and appointments are booked on Saturday.
      2. If you create a new configuration in which Saturday is not bookable, any appointments previously booked for Saturday are no longer valid.

    Include daily break
    • Do not change the value of the Include daily break check box.
    • Do not add the daily break time if this check box is cleared.
    • Do not change the duration of the break.
    • Do not set the break start time and end time to be the same as the daily start time and daily end time because it will not generate bookable slots.