Your clinic settings: a complete guide

Your clinic settings decide when patients can book, what they can book, and what happens when they cancel. In RafaNest they live in a few places in your admin: Calendar for hours and days off, Locations and Treatment types under Schedule and Services, and Settings for booking rules. This guide walks through each one in a sensible order.

1. Clinic profile

In Settings, enter your business name, phone, address and time zone. The time zone matters more than it looks, because bookable slots and the times in patient messages are worked out in it.

2. Working hours

Open Calendar and find the Working hours section. Each weekday can have one or more windows, for example a morning block and an afternoon block, and a day with no window shows as Closed. The Mon to Fri 9 to 5 button fills in a standard week that you can then adjust. If you have several locations, hours are set per location.

3. Days off and special hours

Also on the Calendar page, add Blocked dates for holidays and vacations, optionally with a reason and for one location only. To open different hours on one specific date, add special hours for that day instead of changing your weekly schedule.

4. Locations

Open Locations to add each place you see patients. A location has a name, an address, a slot increment (how far apart start times are), a buffer between appointments, and a number of concurrent rooms with a gap between them. When a clinic has more than one location, patients choose one while booking. A clinic with a single location skips that step.

5. Treatment types (your services)

Under Treatment types, add each service with a name, a duration and a price. You can add a description that patients see while booking, and choose whether the visit is in person, remote by video or hybrid. There are also optional CPT and ICD-10 code fields, which are used later on superbills for out-of-network reimbursement. Video visits are part of the Professional plan.

6. Treatment cards

A treatment card is a prepaid package, such as ten sessions. Create a card type under Treatment cards with a name, a number of treatments and a price, then issue it to a patient. When you book or approve an appointment for a service the card covers, one treatment is deducted and the change is logged in the card history. Treatment cards are part of the Professional plan.

7. Booking rules

In Settings, the Booking and cancellation section holds the rules patients run into.

• Allow patients to cancel their own appointments, or not.
• Cancellation refund window in hours. Leave it blank and it is 24 hours. Cancel earlier and a payment is returned, cancel later and you keep it. You can also choose to never refund, or to only mark a payment refunded and return the money yourself.
• Reschedule lock, the number of hours before an appointment when patients can no longer move it themselves.
• Minimum booking notice, so nobody books a slot an hour from now.
• Require payment before a first appointment, available once you have connected a payment provider. See how to accept payments online with Stripe.

Not sure what to put in the refund window? Start from our cancellation and no-show policy template.

8. Appointment approval

Choose between auto-confirming every booking, requiring approval for all bookings, or requiring approval for new patients only. When approval is on, you can send the patient a notice that their request is pending. Approval for new patients only suits a practice that wants to screen first visits but not returning clients.

9. Intake form for new patients

Also in Settings, pick a form to send automatically to every new patient. Digital forms are part of the Professional plan, and our guide to intake and consent forms covers how to build them.

10. Import your existing patients

Go to Patients and choose Import CSV. Download the template, fill in the columns Name, Email, Phone and SMS consent, and upload it. Put yes in the SMS consent column only for people who have already agreed to appointment texts. The free Starter plan covers up to 25 active patients.

New to the platform? Follow the quick start guide, or the fuller first 30 days checklist.