How to use Today's Bookings

The Today's Bookings grid gives you a real-time view of appointments scheduled for the current day. It's designed to help doctors, staff, and administrators stay organised and responsive. When enabled, the Today's Bookings grid is visible to the left of the HealthTrack screen.

The Today's Bookings feature is enabled upon request. If you cannot see Open Today's Bookings in the Diary menu, the feature has not been enabled for your practice yet. Contact HealthTrack support to have it turned on.

To configure Today's Bookings once enabled, navigate to File > User Preferences and select the Bookings tab.

Enabling Today's Booking

The grid is turned off by default and is switched on in two places:

At the practice level. Your practice needs the feature enabled before it is available to anyone. Once it is on, Diary > Open Today's Bookings appears in the main menu.
For your own login. Each user turns the grid on in File > User Preferences on the Bookings tab, then chooses how it filters (see Filtering Modes below).

To show the grid once it is enabled, go to Diary > Open Today's Bookings.

Filtering Modes

You can choose how bookings are filtered using different modes. These determine which bookings appear in your grid.

Default: If the user is a doctor, this mode will show bookings where the user is the Doctor. If the user is not a doctor, this will show bookings for the user's currently logged in Location.
Doctor: select one or more doctors from the drop-down menu for the grid to show bookings where the selected MOs are the booking's MO.
Staff: select one or more Staff from the drop-down menu for the grid to show bookings where the selected Staff are allocated to one of the 4 staff fields on the booking.
Location: select one or more Locations from the drop-down menu for the grid to show bookings made for the selected Locations.

The grid shows whichever bookings your saved mode points to. It is set from your preferences when the patient window opens and does not follow the doctor or location you have selected in the diary. To change whose bookings you see, update the mode on the Bookings tab (or use the cog icon on the grid).

Double Click Actions

You can choose what happens when you double-click a booking:

Open Booking: double-clicking will open the Booking Form. This is the default setting.
Go To Patient: double-clicking will open the Patient file.

Select the cog icon on the Today's Bookings grid for quick access to User Preferences to choose the double-click action.

Keeping the grid up to date

The grid refreshes on its own, so it stays close to real-time without any action from you:

It refreshes automatically every 5 minutes.
It updates as bookings are added or removed during the day.
You can refresh it at any time with the Refresh button on the grid.

A brand new or just-changed booking may take up to 5 minutes to appear if it does not trigger a live update. Use the Refresh button if you need to see a change straight away.

Show, Hide & Collapse the Today's Bookings grid:

Close the grid: Click the X in the bottom right corner.
Reopen the grid: Go to Diary > Open Today's Bookings in the main menu.
Collapse the grid: Click the [<<] button in the bottom left.
Refresh the grid: Click the Refresh button to reload today's bookings.

The grid's width and open or collapsed state are not remembered between sessions. Whether it opens next time is based on your Bookings tab preference.

Right-Click Actions:

Right-clicking on a booking gives you quick actions. You can select Go To Patient to open the patient's record, or you can select one of the booking status options (i.e. Out Session or Closed) to quickly update the status of the booking.
The status options only appear if you have permission to change booking statuses for that booking's location.
Bookings with statuses like "Cancelled", "Closed", "OutSession", or "No Show" are automatically excluded. Completed bookings are removed from the grid as soon as they are finalised.

Why the grid might be empty

If the grid shows "No bookings" or looks empty, check the following:

It is not turned on for your login. Confirm the grid is enabled on your Bookings tab in File > User Preferences.
It is pointed at the wrong doctor, staff member or location. Check the filtering mode on the Bookings tab. It shows the provider or location you have saved, not the one selected in the diary.
There are no matching bookings today. The grid shows the current day only. A doctor or location with nothing booked today will be empty.
Today's bookings have all finished or been cancelled. Cancelled, closed, out-of-session, no-show and completed bookings are removed from the grid.
A recent booking has not refreshed yet. Click Refresh to reload straight away.