Use case: Therapist booking calendar with shared spaces, group sessions, and more

Scenario: A team of therapists needs to view their own scheduled appointments for the week. Therapists need to see their own appointment details, but details for other therapists need to be kept confidential. 

• A practice of 20 therapists needs a way to manage scheduling. Each therapist needs to see their own separate schedule for the week. 
• The therapists share clients and, for some sessions, use shared spaces which must be booked. It's important that a therapist or a space is never double-booked.
• There are also some therapy groups which may involve two or more therapists working with multiple clients.
• Additionally, there are some group events which are led by more experienced therapists, at which newer therapists may volunteer to assist/observe. 

Central scheduling and individual calendar access

The appointment scheduling is primarily done by a supervisor or an office administrator. However, sometimes clients may book their next appointment directly with the therapist at the end of a session. So it's important that each therapist can not only see their availability, but also add appointments to their own calendars. Therapists also need to add travel, meetings, or PTO to the calendar so schedulers know that they are unavailable during these times. 

Maintaining client confidentiality

Each therapist should be able to see other therapist's sub-calendars but without any event details. This is important in order to maintain client confidentiality. Appointments for other therapists should simply show up as Reserved, with no further information. This way, a therapist can see if another therapist is available to assist at a group session without seeing any details of that therapist's other appointments or client details. 

How Teamup can help

Here's how you could set up a calendar to handle this scenario: 

• Create a sub-calendar for each therapist, and sub-calendars for groups and shared spaces. Sort the sub-calendars into folders. 
• Set all sub-calendars to not allow overlapping events; this will prevent a therapist or a shared space from being double-booked.
• Give each therapist the following permissions: 
  • Modify-my-events for their own sub-calendar.
  • Read-only for the group sub-calendars.
  • Add-only for the shared space sub-calendars. 
  • Read-only, no details for the other therapist's sub-calendars.
• Add a custom choice field with options to indicate the session format/type (e.g., Zoom, in-person, one on one, family session, etc.).
• Add a custom text field for notes, e.g., to indicate if newer therapists can observe a group session, if volunteer assistance is welcomed, etc. 
• You can also set up custom event fields to hold client information such as name, phone number, program type, etc.
• Enable comments for therapists to make notes. 

How it works for schedulers

• The schedulers have full Modify access to all sub-calendars, so they can see all event details for all sub-calendars and add, change, or delete events and appointments as needed. 
• When a client makes an appointment, the scheduler can use filter options to check the availability of any specific therapist, or view all therapist sub-calendars for a requested time to see who has an open slot. 
• The scheduler can do a quick search by the client name, as well, to ensure that the appointment is being scheduled for the appropriate timing (e.g., weekly). 

How it works for therapists

• A therapist can see all the events on their own calendar, including all event details (client information, session type). 
• When they want to add an appointment, they can do so as long as it does not conflict with an event that is already on their calendar. If a therapist tries to add an appointment that conflicts with another appointment on their calendar, they will get an error. 
• If a therapist needs to book an appointment using a shared space, they can do so by creating an event and assigning it to both their own sub-calendar and the shared space calendar.
  • Note that with Add-only permission, they can add an event (as long as does not overlap with another event already on either sub-calendar) and they have a time window (in the same browser session) in which to modify the event that they have added. After that window, they will not be able to modify or delete the event. If the appointment were to be canceled, the therapist would need to let the scheduler know so they could delete that event; this is usually helpful, so that the scheduler is then aware that the shared space has become open for that time period. 

See more about how to set up a booking system for groups, or see how to enable client self-booking.