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Topic starter
Our office has applied for COVID-19 vaccine administration. We are developing workflows in case we are selected to administer them in our practice. Looking to see if anyone has looked into self-scheduling for this? We do not want to use our patient portal option due to the cost but we are considering other low cost options.
Is anyone using acuity scheduling or software similar?
Posted : January 18, 2021 5:31 am
Yes - we will be using Acuity as well for scheduling COVID vaccines. We have not done so yet. The one down-side is that it doesn't import those appointments into the CPS Scheduling component. So we are currently planning on having front desk staff manually add them to the CPS Schedule.
Posted : January 18, 2021 6:34 am
Topic starter
Is this easy for patients to self-schedule? Also, is the set-up easy to complete?
Thank you for the insight!
Posted : January 18, 2021 6:47 am
I haven't worked with Acuity myself, but I was curious so I took a look at their site. If the schedules aren't near-real time on both sides, I would be concerned about scheduling conflicts.With humans entering data, you have the potential to introduce errors there also.
According to https://developers.acuityscheduling.com/ they have an API. My first thought is that it may be possible to poll the API periodically and generate an HL7 SIU message to send to CPS, and in the other direction, read an SIU message from CPS and update Acuity via the API. In theory this should keep the schedules in sync. Of course, this is much easier said than done--but it might be worthwhile to explore.
-dp
Posted : January 18, 2021 6:57 am
We are planning on using acuity as well. We've already done some API work. Problem is matching the patients in the CPS. I'm hoping we can just bill out of the EMR without an appointment and just use acuity as the source of records for appointments.
Posted : January 18, 2021 9:32 am
What other options have been seen, aside from acuity? Some have mentioned portals. Is this the CPS/surescripts portal or 3rd party?
Thanks!
Posted : January 20, 2021 9:19 am
