Clinic Group Scheduling System

The heart of the system is a group-wide calendar. Appointments, clinicians, treatment rooms and equipment are modelled as separate resources, and every booking has to satisfy all of them at once: the clinician must be free and at the right site, the room must suit the treatment, and any equipment the appointment needs must not already be in use. Entity Framework Core and Azure SQL hold the schedule, and SignalR pushes changes to every open diary so two receptionists cannot book the same slot.

Clinician availability is not just a list of working hours. It includes which site a physiotherapist is at on each day and the travel time between locations, so the system will not offer a 9:30 appointment in one clinic to someone who finishes in another at 9:15.

• Shared availability for clinicians, rooms and equipment
• Travel time between sites built into availability
• Live updates so two people never book the same slot

Because every site’s availability is in one place, the booking screen can search across clinics. A receptionist enters the treatment type and the patient’s location, and the system lists the earliest suitable slots at nearby sites, not only at the clinic the patient happened to call. Patients who are flexible about location are seen sooner, and quieter clinics fill gaps that used to go unbooked.

The same search powers rebooking. When a clinician is off sick, their patients can be offered the next available appointment with a colleague at the same or a neighbouring site, rather than being pushed to the back of one clinic’s queue.

No-shows were the group’s most expensive gap, so automated appointment reminders were designed around making it easy to respond. Reminders go out by SMS and email on a schedule that varies by appointment type, and each one carries a link to confirm or reschedule in a single tap. A patient who cannot make it is far more likely to say so when rescheduling takes seconds rather than a phone call during opening hours.

Released slots go straight back into the shared diary, where the cross-site search can offer them to someone else. Combined, these changes reduced no-shows by 42%.

Staff sign in through Microsoft Entra ID with the accounts they already use for email and documents, and role-based permissions decide what each person can see and change. Reception teams manage bookings, clinicians see their own lists and notes, and managers see the whole group. Removing a separate password for 140 staff also removed a steady stream of reset requests.

Utilisation reporting shows occupancy, cancellations and revenue per slot by clinic and clinician. With room and clinician utilisation now up to 88% across the group, managers can plan staffing against real demand rather than each site’s impression of how busy it is.