Scheduling & intake

A paper diary or a spreadsheet only tells you who booked which slot. It does not remind the patient, does not show when they reached the desk, and cannot say which doctor is free tomorrow afternoon. Each of those questions goes back to whoever is on shift, and the answer lives in their memory. When shifts change or someone is off, whatever the patient said on the phone disappears too.

The front desk books from the customer record, in the Appointments tab. Because it starts from the record, the software already knows whose appointment it is, so there is no retyping a name or phone number, and the list of earlier bookings sits right below the button, which helps avoid two bookings for one person on the same day. If the customer is not in the system yet, create the record first.

Only two fields are required, the appointment type and the branch; the rest, including service, date and time, expected duration, doctor, technician, customer source and consultant, can be filled in later. That matches how phone calls really go: if the patient has not chosen a doctor, leave it empty. The customer request field comes with prompt lines such as information, condition, wishes, cost and special notes, next to an internal note that the customer cannot read.

The appointment type is not decoration. There are five: new consultation, treatment, follow-up, warranty, and appointment from Zalo, which the software records itself when a customer books through Zalo. The day and hour distribution tables count appointments per type, so choosing the wrong type at booking means misreading the clinic later.

A common mistake is to record vague patient remarks as appointments. The rule in Cluvix Health is straightforward: if the patient has fixed a specific date and time, create an appointment and the software holds that slot for the doctor and branch. If the patient is unsure and you need to call back, create a reminder, which holds no slot and has no check-in step.

On the reminder date, the unfinished reminders dialog appears when staff open the software, so nobody has to remember to check a calendar. After the call, if the patient fixes a time, you create a new appointment. One customer can hold both an appointment and a reminder, for example a reminder to call and confirm a day ahead for someone who tends to forget.

The appointment menu has five screens, and each serves one question. The appointment list is the front desk working screen for the shift; it defaults to today only, with a search box for name or phone and filters for status and new versus returning customers. Distribution by day shows which days of the week are busy, split by branch and appointment type, which helps when planning next week's duty roster.

ZNS is a notification message sent through Zalo by phone number. Tied to appointments, there are two automatic moments. As soon as the front desk saves an appointment, the patient receives a booking confirmation. Before the visit, the software runs a daily background job that scans the next day's appointments and sends a reminder; an appointment made earlier the same day is not reminded again, since the patient just received the confirmation.

The clinic controls the wording through message templates: choose a template that Zalo has approved for the Zalo OA account, attach it to a trigger, then map its blanks to software data such as customer name, appointment date and time, and branch name and address. A template only sends when it is active and switched on, a reminder template can be limited to certain appointment types, and there is a test-send to the phone of the Zalo OA administrator before going live. The Zalo OA must be connected first.

Automatic messages do not replace a call. For cases that need a specialist doctor, a machine room or supplies, care staff or consultants still phone the patient a day ahead and mark the result. The suggested routine is to filter the list to tomorrow, call one by one, mark confirmed when the patient will come, cancel or reschedule when they are busy, and if no one answers, leave it unconfirmed and set a reminder to call again the next morning.

On the day, the front desk clicks check-in and the software takes the real time automatically, with no typing. The appointment then moves through in consultation and in treatment, updated by doctors, consultants or technicians, and ends with left when the patient is done. Every step records the time and the person in the action log, and it cannot be edited by hand. When a patient asks why they waited so long, comparing check-in time with appointment time shows whether they arrived early or the clinic ran late. Before the patient leaves the desk, the docs suggest recording payment and booking the follow-up right away.

Cancelling is not the same as deleting. Cancelling keeps the record with a cancelled status, keeps its history viewable and still counts it in reports as a cancelled appointment; deleting removes the row for good with no recovery, so it is only for bookings made in error, duplicates or wrong patient. The cancel button exists only for appointments that have not yet happened. The detail panel of each appointment also gathers the status, medical data such as vital signs entered by the nurse, the creator and last updater, plus a notes field and an internal discussion between staff.

The story of an appointment does not stop when the patient leaves. Each time staff record a treatment session, the software creates a care task for the next day and assigns it to customer care, if the clinic has that option on. When a patient completes a full course of a service, the software schedules a chain of care tasks at the configured milestones, such as after 7 days or after 1 month. These turn follow-up calls and revisit reminders from "do it if you remember" into tasks with a name, a date and an owner.

With a standalone diary or a separate booking tool, each stage above has to be copied by hand somewhere else. Here appointments, the customer record, ZNS messages and care share the same data. This page is for front desk staff, consultants, customer care staff and clinic managers; each person only sees the modules they are permitted to use. How it connects to the medical chart is covered on the electronic medical records page.