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OutSmart Guide

Waitlist

The OutSmart Waitlist lets your clinic capture patients who want an appointment but can’t find one that fits — and show them to your staff the moment a matching opening appears. There are no holds and no automated notifications. It’s a manual workflow built around a single dashboard card that tells your team who is waiting, what they’re waiting for, and whether anything has opened up that matches.

Every waitlist entry is tied to a specific appointment type and one or more practitioners, plus a set of patient preferences (which days of the week, which periods of the day, minimum notice required, optional date range, how they’d like to be contacted). The system continuously checks the live calendar against those preferences and tags each entry green, orange, or red based on whether matching openings exist.

Where the Waitlist Lives

The waitlist appears in four different places across OutSmart. Each has a specific job:

WhereWho Uses ItWhat It Does
Waitlist Dashboard CardPractitioners + admin staffView, search, filter, and act on every active waitlist entry for your office
Add to Waitlist panelPractitioners + admin staffCreate or edit waitlist entries on behalf of a patient (e.g., from a phone call)
Online Booking WaitlistYour patientsA “Join Waitlist” option that appears when no online booking times match their needs
Find Availability calendar toolPractitioners + admin staffSearch the calendar for slots that fit a patient’s preferences — and optionally drop them on the waitlist in the same flow

Key Concepts

Preferences

Every entry captures the patient’s availability as a day-of-week × time-of-day grid (Mon–Sun across AM / PM / Evening). Alternatively the entry can be marked Any available time (sometimes called ASAP), which matches any opening regardless of day or period. The system uses these preferences to decide which calendar slots count as matches for that patient.

Multi-Practitioner Entries

A waitlist entry can name a single practitioner, several specific practitioners, or — if the patient added themselves through online booking — any practitioner offering the service. Multi-practitioner entries are matched against every practitioner on the list at once, and each matching slot is labelled with the practitioner it belongs to so your staff knows who is open.

Bookability (Color Coding)

Each entry on the dashboard is tagged based on whether matching openings exist in the next 6 months:

  • Green — Matching slots within 90 days
  • Orange — Matching slots between 90 and 180 days out
  • Red — No matching slots in the next 6 months

Bookability is what powers the Available vs No Availability tabs on the dashboard card.

Aging

Entries are also tagged by age — how long they’ve been on the list. Anything older than 90 days appears under the Aging tab as a reminder to revisit. This is independent of bookability: a single entry can be both green (has openings) AND aged (has been waiting a long time).

Who Sees What

RoleWhat They See on the Dashboard Card
PractitionerOnly entries assigned to them
Admin staffEvery entry across all practitioners in the office
PatientTheir own entries via online booking (no dashboard card access)

What the Waitlist Does NOT Do

It’s important to understand what’s intentionally not automated:

  • No automatic phone calls, emails, or texts when a slot opens. Your staff decides who to contact and when.
  • No exclusive holds. A matching slot isn’t reserved for the waitlisted patient — anyone can still book it through normal channels.
  • No cascade. If a contacted patient declines, the system doesn’t automatically move to the next match.
  • No removal on a stale entry. Entries stay active until staff mark them booked or cancelled.

This is a deliberate design choice — it gives your staff full control over how, when, and who they contact, with the system simply surfacing the opportunities.

Getting Started

The waitlist lives in four places, and each one has its own setup. Only one of them requires anything to be turned on:

  • Waitlist Dashboard Card — add the card to your dashboard. Any practitioner or admin can add it; no special permissions, no feature toggle, no admin involvement needed. Once it’s on your dashboard, you can start managing waitlist entries.
  • Add to Waitlist panel — opens from the + button on the dashboard card. No separate setup.
  • Find Availability calendar tool — available in the calendar toolbar when you’re using Calendar 2.0 (the standard OutSmart calendar). Not available if your clinic is still on the older Calendar 1.0. See Find Availability Tool for details.
  • Online Booking Waitlist — this is the only piece that requires enabling. To let patients add themselves through your online booking page, turn on the Waitlist setting in your online booking page editor. The setting is controlled by the office owner, admin staff, or — for a practitioner-priority booking page — the practitioner themselves on their own page. See Waitlist Settings for how.

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