Digitising OPD appointments and queue without chaos

Many clinics still store appointments as a single clock time and hope staff remember duration. That breaks when a 30 minute consult collides with a 15 minute follow-up booked at the same start. Modern OPD software marks occupancy across the full interval so Booked, Arrived and On-going visits block the same window.

Online patient bookings should occupy the slot immediately (often as Pending) until front desk confirms or declines. Otherwise two patients can claim the same start time before anyone reviews the request list.

Keep Pending online requests on a short review screen for front desk and doctors. Approved visits become Booked on the main list and queue. Declined visits free the slot and notify the patient. Mixing unconfirmed requests into the live queue confuses token calling and billing prep.

For same day online booking, enforce a lead time (for example thirty minutes) so patients cannot book a slot that starts before the clinic can prepare. Past slots should disappear from the patient picker the way cinema apps hide sold seats.

Assign tokens once at create time as one sequence per day shared across all doctors, so no two patients on the same date share a token number and reprints or reschedules do not invent new numbers. Walk-ins take the next free slot for that doctor and can land as Arrived when the patient is already in the lobby.

Leave days and empty OPD windows must block booking at the API, not only in a paper roster. Overbook should be an explicit staff choice, not the default. When doctors turn booking off for a day, slots and patient portal availability should both respect that flag.