Providers that offer scheduling often set a default buffer time (found in the Profile’s settings).

This guarantees a minimum duration of time before a patient is able to book an available time slot.

In order to make buffers more customizable, blockit offers Dynamic Slot Buffers via submitting a support request. 

Dynamic Slot Buffers allow profiles to have multiple buffer durations that can be configured to trigger depending on the scenario.

DSBs can trigger based off:

• what procedure/visit type the patient is searching for

• what insurance/payor plan the patient has

• which blockit product the booking originates from (referral or consumer)

Dynamic Slot Buffering by visit type is implicitly supported in both referral and consumer products.

Filtering by insurance plan requires some setup from the blockit team for each product via support ticket. 

Referral

Payor plan buffering is based on the selection of a payor and plan during the schedule-a-patient process. These options will only be applied if you’ve enabled the organization referral setting for “INSURANCE SELECT FOR BUFFER”

Once this setting has been applied, two additional select fields will be on the schedule-a-patient form. These selections will then be applied to the URL and used to determine the correct slot buffer.

Consumer Directory

In order to apply Dynamic Slot Buffers by payor plans in consumer, there must be a prescreening questionnaire set up to require selecting an insurance plan prior to displaying search results. This will need to be done by submitting a ticket to the blockit support team to build.

The new questionnaire item dropdown will pull insurance plans from any profiles in the network group that have associated insurance plans (Profile edit page > Insurance Management > Add selected plans). Example:

Navigate to the directory’s URL and you should see the prescreening questionnaire with the insurance plan dropdown:

After submitting the questionnaire, the directory URL should contain the UUID of the selected payor plan, example: &plans[]=40ca5014-b7df-40ab-b6f2-cbcb206ebe2f