I 🧡 Waitlists

Waitlists by Healthengine gives your patients the ability to add themselves to an online waitlist via the same Healthengine booking form they already know and love. This allows you to save on reception team hours and admin time with less patient calls and direct enquiries to the front desk, requesting to be added to a waitlist.

When your practice has a cancellation and needs the appointment filled at short notice, we’ll automatically SMS patients from your waitlist that match the appointment preferences with a link to book. Prefer to choose waitlisted patients to notify your patients? You can manually select waitlisted patients you’d like to notify of a newly available appointment, and then SMS them individually or in bulk.

It’s the Waitlist solution you’ll fall in love with, now with automated SMS.

Filling last-minute cancellations is now even easier with our NEW automated SMS feature for waitlists.

We’ll automatically SMS waitlisted patients when an appointment opens up with a link to make a booking.

Waitlists are available to GP, Dental, Allied and Specialist practices. There are some limitations on Waitlist automation for some Dental customers. Talk to our team about the right plan for your practice.

No additional SMS fees with this one! Healthengine provides the SMS sends to patients as part of the Waitlists feature at no additional per SMS cost.

Once you’ve activated Waitlists, there’s a setting that allows patients to add themselves to your Waitlist, which can be toggled on / off in Practice Admin. The default setting is off, meaning patients can’t autonomously add themselves to your Waitlist without your practice first enabling this setting.

When the setting is on, there are various Waitlist entry points that can be found on your Healthengine Profile and within your practice’s booking form that encourages patients to add themselves to a Waitlist slot if no suitable time is available.

The following locations will display Waitlist options for patients:

• The appointment time selection page in your practice’s booking flow when a patient clicks the See all appointments button
• The appointment time selection page in your practice’s booking flow when a patient hasn’t selected a time
• Your website widget booking page

We understand that some patients may still want to call the practice or walk-in before requesting to be added to your Waitlist. When this happens, you have the ability to manually add patients to your Waitlist all within the Healthengine dashboard.

With Waitlists, you simply fill in a number of questions regarding the entry, including the patient’s name and contact details, the type of appointment they want to have, the practitioner they wish to see (if they have a preference), any additional notes you’d like to add for triaging as well as what days and times they are available.

If you wish to edit a Waitlist entry, this is easily done within the Healthengine dashboard. You have the ability to update any of the fields associated with the patient’s Waitlist request and the patient is not informed if their entry is updated.

It’s the same process for deleting Waitlist entries. You will be prompted to confirm if you wish to delete a request. This action cannot be undone, and you will need to create a new Waitlist entry for the patient if they wish to be re-added to the Waitlist. The patient is not informed if their entry is removed.

Some practices might have a lot of patient requests in the Waitlist, and it can be hard to find certain patients or those matching certain criteria. There are a number of filters that can be applied to help find suitable patients when a cancellation occurs. These search filters work across all the entries, so if there are multiple pages of Waitlist entries, all eligible patients will be shown.

You can filter your Waitlist by:

• Preferred practitioner
• Appointment type
• Appointment date
• Appointment time

For both the automated SMS or manual bulk sms options, up to 10 patients can be notified at a time.

We’ve got you covered! If a patient tries to add themselves to your Waitlist as a ‘new’ patient, when a practice only has appointment types for existing patients, or doesn’t accept new patients, the patient is prevented from adding themselves to the Waitlist and sees a message explaining the practice doesn’t offer those appointment types to new patients.

Head to the Resources Section in Practice Admin to download a collection of in-practice marketing assets and collateral you can use to promote Waitlists to your patients. We also recommend using Healthengine’s Communicate add-on to send existing patients bulk SMS messages, letting them know of your new online Waitlist services.

We’re excited to show you what we’ve been working on! If you’re interesting in learning more about how Waitlists works through a demo, simply complete the contact form on this page and our friendly team will be in touch.

Yes, patients are automatically removed from the waitlist if they book an appointment at your practice.