Working with Patients across Time Zones

If you work with patients across multiple time zones, then this guide is for you! We have gathered a list of features and suggestions here that will help with patient booking and communication when someone is not in the same time zone as your practice.

This feature will show your clinic’s time zone everywhere a patient views appointment information. Your time zone will display next to appointment times when a patient is booking online, in their appointment-related emails, waitlist requests, and throughout their My Account area.

An image of where a patient would see the clinic's timezone when looking for an appointment

💡 Quick tip - your clinic’s time zone is set within your Settings > Clinic Info. If you live in an area that adopts daylight savings then Jane takes care of that adjustment for you. No need to adjust things.

If you want to grab the attention of patients before they book, adding a banner to your Online Booking site is another great tool to use.

An image of where the online booking banner appears

To add a banner, head to your Settings Tab > Language and look for Notice / Message on Online Booking Pages. You can enter the information that you’d like to appear at the top of your online booking site and use Markdown to further format your message with things like bolding, italics, links or headings.

Adding Language to Reminders and Notifications

If you want to share a bit more information in all appointment email communication, another tool is to customize the language in your emails. This is a great option if you want to include more text about your policies or procedures related to bookings. It also doesn’t hurt to give patients another heads up that you may be in a different time zone to them ;)

To customize, head to your Settings > Language and look for “Thanks for Booking Email: Details” and “Reminder Email: Details”.

An image of the navigational steps to view and update the language for the thanks for booking notification sent out to patients after they've booked an appointment

If you want to preview what your text looks like, head to your Settings > Emails and use the drop-down to review your updates.

An image of the navigational steps to preview where the text displays for booking notifications

If you’re looking for even more ways to customize your Jane account, head on over to our Customizing Jane guide for tips and tricks.

How patients can select their Time Zone in the My Account portal

Patients can log into the My Account Patient Portal and select Time Zone within the menu on the left.

An image of the navigational steps to view and update time zones from the patient portal

There, they can choose their preferred time zone from a drop-down menu and click Save. Once saved, all appointments and appointment reminders will display in the patient’s selected time zone, making it easier to manage bookings across different locations.

How staff can update a patient’s time zone

If a patient doesn’t use online booking or needs a hand updating their time zone, you can head to their profile, and their time zone will be under their address. Until it’s been customized, it will be set by default to the same time zone as the clinic.

Next, click Edit/Settings under the patient’s name.

On the editing screen, you can choose the patient’s time zone from the drop-down menu underneath their phone numbers:

Make sure to save your changes, and you’re all set!

For more details on this, you can check out our Patient’s Preferred Time Zone.

Additional Notes & FAQ

⭐️Can different locations in my account have their own time zones?

No, currently timezones are a clinic-wide setting that applies to all of the locations within a Jane account and cannot be customized.

⭐️What does the “Account Offline” message mean when I update our clinic’s time zone?

If you’ve just updated your clinic’s time zone in Settings > Clinic Info > Timezone, you might see this message Hang tight! We’re making some important changes behind the scenes.:

An image of what the account is offline or hang tight, we're making some important changes behind the scenes message for patients viewing the online booking site

This means Jane is working behind the scenes to update your appointment times, schedules, and other time-sensitive settings. Depending on the size of your clinic, this process usually takes about 5 to 15 minutes.

We recommend making this change at the end of your day to avoid any interruptions to online booking while everything catches up.

⭐️ What happens to existing shifts and appointments when the timezone is updated administratively?

Changing your clinic’s time zone in Jane (Settings > Clinic Info) affects how appointment times are displayed, but not when they’re scheduled. Because of this, shifts and appointments keep their original times. For example, an appointment booked at 3pm PST will show as 3pm EST after the change.

If any appointment times need to be adjusted, these changes will need to be made manually. You can learn how to move or edit existing appointments in our Booking, Changing, or Moving an Appointment (Staff) guide.

As always, we’d love to hear from you. If you have any questions or need help with your account, don’t hesitate to contact us.

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