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Administrative
Add and manage patients, manage appointments and manage transport.
Appointments
Use Communicare appointments to book future appointments and record services provided without an appointment, for example, walk-in patients.
Working with the Appointment Book
Use the Appointment Book to add sessions, book and change appointments, and check patient's in.
Add Sessions to the Appointment Book
Sessions with a type of Weekly are inserted automatically. As you open up booking days in the future, you may need to add new sessions into which you can book appointments, or you may need to add additional sessions at any time.

Administrative
Add and manage patients, manage appointments and manage transport.
- Patients
  Communicare uses the term Patient to refer to the clients of a health service.
- Appointments
  Use Communicare appointments to book future appointments and record services provided without an appointment, for example, walk-in patients.
  - Working with the Appointment Book
    Use the Appointment Book to add sessions, book and change appointments, and check patient's in.
    - Add Sessions to the Appointment Book
      Sessions with a type of Weekly are inserted automatically. As you open up booking days in the future, you may need to add new sessions into which you can book appointments, or you may need to add additional sessions at any time.
    - Reserve Timeslots
      If your provider needs time set aside without any patient bookings, that is not already included as a provider planned absence, or public holiday, reserve timeslots.
  - Book Appointments
    After you have configured your session templates and sessions have been inserted, either manually or automatically, you can book appointments.
  - Edit Appointments or Sessions
    Cancel appointment sessions, replace a session provider, or reschedule or cancel appointments.
  - Checking a patient in
    In the Appointment Book, you can manage an appointment's progress: you can check in a patient when they arrive for their appointment and then monitor the progress of that patient through your health service during their appointment.
  - Simultaneous Check-In
    The Simultaneous Check-In window is displayed when checking in a patient who has more than one appointment today. It allows patients with multiple appointments to be efficiently managed through services with multiple providers.
  - Walk-in patients
    Walk-in patients are those who arrive without an appointment. That is, they just walk in.
  - Patient Appointment and Service History
    From the Appointment Book or clinical record, use the Service List window to view a list of all upcoming appointments for a patient, and a patient's appointment and service history.
  - Appointment Book report
    Use the Appointment Book report to print the appointments book in a format that can be used in an emergency as a paper appointments book. It is also useful when reviewing the setup of the appointments book.
  - SMS Messages and Reminders
    In Communicare V21.1 and later, you can send appointment reminders to patients using Telstra Health's SMS gateway (TH Messaging) and a new interface.
  - SMS Messaging Using Burst
    Set up SMS messaging so that your health service can send SMS messages to patients using Burst.
- Transport
  Communicare offers two ways of managing transport services.

Add Sessions to the Appointment Book

Sessions with a type of Weekly are inserted automatically. As you open up booking days in the future, you may need to add new sessions into which you can book appointments, or you may need to add additional sessions at any time.

You can view only those appointment sessions created from templates with an Encounter Program to which you have access. Similarly, when adding Appointment sessions, only templates with Encounter Programs you have access to, or no Encounter Program specified, are available. For more information, see Appointment Session Templates.

You can insert a session with a type of Manual for any day. Weekly sessions can be inserted manually only for the day of the week for which they have been defined.

To insert a session into the appointment book:

In the Appointment Book, click Insert.
In the Session Templates List, select the session you want to insert.
Click OK.

The session is added to the Appointment Book unless it was not possible to insert the session because of overlaps between providers or facilities and so on.

If there are errors in the Template Application Log, analyse the information and select a different session to insert.

16 February 2026