Online booking for a clinic or practice, with the boundary stated up front: this schedules patients. It is not an EMR, and it does not bill insurance.
Practices shopping for a “doctor booking system” usually mean one of two very different things, and buying the wrong one wastes months.
| What you actually need | What to buy |
|---|---|
| Charts, prescriptions, clinical notes, insurance claims, and scheduling as one module of it | An EMR or practice-management platform. Not Bookafy. Do not try to assemble one out of scheduling software. |
| You already have an EMR, but patients still have to phone to book, and reception is drowning | A dedicated online booking layer. This is what Bookafy is for. |
The second case is far more common than vendors admit. Most practices are not missing a records system. They are missing a way for a patient to book at 9pm without a phone call, and a reminder that stops them forgetting.
A repeat prescription is ten minutes. A new-patient consultation is forty. If the calendar treats them the same, you will run late every single day, and the fault will look like the clinician’s. Each service in Bookafy carries its own duration and its own buffer, so a slot is only ever offered if the appointment genuinely fits it.
Patients who need a specific doctor should be able to book them. Patients who just need to be seen should go to first-available or round-robin, so the load spreads instead of piling on whoever is most popular.
Text and email reminders are included on the paid plans. Pro+ adds a second SMS reminder, which is worth having if your no-show rate is high enough to be costing sessions. This is the highest-return setting in the product for a clinic.
Bookafy is HIPAA compliant on the Pro+ plan. It is not on Free or Pro. If a patient types anything about their condition into an intake question, you need Pro+. Full detail on HIPAA-compliant scheduling.
No. Bookafy books appointments. It does not hold charts, prescriptions, clinical notes or insurance claims. It sits alongside your EMR, not instead of it.
Yes, on the Pro+ plan. Not on Free or Pro. If patients are entering health information at booking, Pro+ is the plan you need.
Yes, and they should. A 10-minute repeat prescription and a 40-minute new-patient consultation are different services with different durations, and the calendar only offers slots that genuinely fit.
Yes. Send a booking to a named clinician, to first-available, or round-robin across the team. Each clinician has their own hours and services.
Automatic text and email reminders are included on paid plans, and Pro+ adds a second SMS reminder. Reminders are the most effective lever available; nothing eliminates no-shows entirely.
You can take payment or a deposit at booking through Stripe or Authorize.net. There is no insurance billing or claims submission.
Bookafy has a free plan and a free trial of the paid plans — no credit card to start. Start your free trial or see pricing.
If you are still working out which tool you need, start with the overview: appointment scheduling software — what it does, what it costs, and when you should buy something else.
Also useful: every Bookafy integration, in three honest lists — what is native, what needs Zapier, and what we simply do not do. And the pricing page, where the feature matrix is the real answer to “is that on the free plan”.
