Open a group practice in a week

Why the order of operations matters

Carepatron is a layered system. Locations sit underneath services. Services sit underneath team availability. Team availability sits underneath online booking. If you invite four clinicians into an empty workspace, the first hour of every onboarding becomes you explaining what's not there yet. Worse, every clinician will start configuring their own services and availability around assumptions that change a week later.

The correct order is branding → locations → services → team → availability → workflows → soft launch. Each step assumes the previous one is done. Set up locations before services because every service needs at least one location to appear in online booking. Build the service catalogue before inviting the team because team members are assigned to specific services. Get availability dialled in before turning on workflows because workflow reminders depend on actual booked appointments.

One exception worth flagging: subscription tier. Decide upfront whether you're on Plus or Advanced. Custom branding is available on Plus and above. Theme colour customisation, white labeling, and granular roles and permissions are Advanced-only. Pricing is per team member, per workspace, and changes are prorated automatically. A four-clinician practice on Advanced runs $196/month, $156/month if billed annually. Plus is $39/user/month ($31 annual). Free is $0 regardless of team size.

The plan that follows assumes you're the owner, you have admin access, and you're opening the workspace from a blank slate. Adapt the pace to fit your calendar. The sequence matters more than the calendar dates.

Foundations: owner setup and branding

Do this alone, before any team member sees the workspace. A branded, theme-coloured workspace tells clinicians the system is ready for them. A bare default tells them they're early.

Go to Settings → Workspace settings → Details → Workspace branding. Click Update Logo and upload your practice logo. PNG or JPEG, under 5MB. While you're in the same section, upload your expanded and collapsed sidebar logos. The expanded version shows when the left-hand menu is open. The collapsed version displays as a small snapshot, a full wordmark won't read well at that size.

If you're on the Advanced plan, set your workspace theme colour. Go to Settings → My Profile → Theme, click Edit, choose your colour, and save. This is part of Carepatron's white-labeling feature and only available on Advanced. The theme propagates to every user in your workspace unless they've previously set a personal theme colour of their own.

While you're in workspace settings, check the workspace name, country, and time zone are correct. Get the country right early, it drives currency, tax handling, and pricing localization. The wrong country means awkward conversions on every invoice.

Finally, before moving on, delete the sample team member named Wendy Smith from your team page. She's a sample account that ships with every new workspace to help you explore the platform. Leave her in place and you'll spend the rest of the week explaining who she is. Hover over her row, click the overflow icon (three vertical dots), and select Delete.

Locations and services

Locations come before services because every service must be available at one or more locations to appear in online booking. Get this wrong and your booking page will be empty even with services configured.

Go to Settings → Scheduling → Locations. Click + New location. For a multi-site practice, create one location per consulting room or office address. If you have two offices with three rooms each, that's six locations, not two. Granular locations let you assign specific rooms to specific clinicians later, which matters when two practitioners share a building.

Add your virtual locations next. Carepatron supports Carepatron Telehealth, Zoom, Google Meet, Doxy.me, Microsoft Teams, and phone call locations. For Carepatron Telehealth, leave the link field blank, the system generates session links automatically. For Zoom, Google Meet, Doxy.me, and Teams, paste the host's personal room or meeting link. If your team uses individual Zoom rooms, create one virtual location per clinician.

With locations in place, move to Settings → Scheduling → Services. Build your service catalogue. For a group practice, organise by collections grouped by treatment phase rather than by clinician. Try Initial consultations, Treatment sessions, and Reviews. Clinician-based collections look tidy until you hire someone or someone leaves; phase-based collections survive both.

On the Services page, select New collection, enter a name, and select the services to include from the dropdown. For each individual service, set duration, price, billing code, and whether it's a Group event (toggle the slider on the service details page if you offer workshops or group therapy). Hold off on assigning staff and locations until your team is in, that's the cross-cutting step once invitations have gone out.

Inviting the team, and the permission pattern

Now invite the team. Go to Your team in the left side panel, click + New team member, and complete the form: name, mobile, email, job title, access type. An invite email goes out automatically. Carepatron does not have a direct resend option, so if someone doesn't receive their invite, the workaround is to share the manual signup link https://app.carepatron.com/Register?&isProvider=true. They sign up with the email you invited and the system matches them in.

On the Advanced plan, you can customise permissions across five areas: client profiles, client documentation, scheduling and calendars, invoices and payments, and workspace settings. Most areas have access set to one of three values: None, Assigned only, or Everything, except Scheduling and calendars, which uses Own calendar or Everything, and Workspace settings, which uses None or Everything. On Free or Plus, granular permissions are not available, every team member sees everything. If you have a part-time biller or a junior staffer who needs read-only access, that's an argument for Advanced.

Five practical role patterns cover most group practices:

Practice manager: Everything across all five areas. Usually one or two people.

Practitioner: Client profiles and documentation set to Assigned only. Scheduling set to own calendar. Invoices set to Assigned only or None depending on your billing setup. Workspace settings set to None.

Front desk admin: Scheduling set to Everything, invoices set to Everything, but client documentation set to None, they handle bookings and billing without seeing clinical notes.

Billing-only contractor: Invoices set to Everything, everything else None or Assigned only.

Locum or short-term clinician: Same as Practitioner but with documentation set to Assigned only and scheduling set to own calendar.

One gotcha: permission changes require the affected user to log out and log back in before they take effect. Tell people to refresh after you've made the change, not before. To assign clients to a clinician, go to the team member's Permissions tab and click + Assign clients.

Per-clinician availability and service assignment

This is where most group practices stall. Each team member needs services ticked and an availability schedule set, otherwise their slots won't appear in online booking.

On the team page, click a team member's name, then go to the Services and availability tab. Click Edit under services and tick the boxes for each service that clinician offers. If a service isn't ticked here, online booking will not surface that clinician for that service even if everything else is configured correctly.

Then scroll to Availability and click + New. Select the days of the week, set the working hours, and attach a location to each block. A clinician who works Monday and Wednesday at the main office and Tuesday and Thursday from telehealth needs two availability blocks, one per location. Save.

Use date-specific hours for one-off changes: holiday closures, conference attendance, a half-day for a CPD course.

The critical detail: online booking will only show a slot when all three conditions are met. The service has online booking enabled and at least one location attached. The clinician is assigned to the service. The clinician has availability at that location at that time. Miss any one of these and the slot vanishes from the booking page. When troubleshooting a missing slot, work backwards through these three.

If your practice runs multiple Carepatron workspaces, for example, a clinical workspace and a separate teaching workspace, connect the same Google account to each clinician's profile in every workspace. Go to Settings → My Profile → Connected apps and connect Google Calendar. Once connected to the same Google account across workspaces, a booking in any workspace blocks that time slot in all the others. No more double-bookings across practices.

Workflow architecture for a team

Workflows fire on triggers and run for the whole workspace. Set them up once at the owner level and every clinician inherits the same automated client onboarding.

Go to Workflows in the left sidebar. Carepatron groups workflows into four event categories: Client and documentation (intake forms, portal invites), Scheduling (appointments created, received, declined, cancelled, rescheduled), Communication (in-app chat messages), and Billing and payment (invoice paid, refund processed, superbill sent).

For a new group practice, prioritise two workflows:

Send intake: Fires when a new client is created. Sends every form in your default intake folder (the starred folder in Templates) to the new client. To set the folder up, go to Templates, hover over an intake form, click Move to folder, and select Intake. You can include up to 9 forms in the default intake folder. The intake workflow then sends all of them to every new client automatically.

Automate portal invite: Fires when a new client is created. Invites them to the patient portal so they can book follow-ups, message the team, and access shared documents. Run this alongside Send intake.

Then configure reminders. Go to Workflows → Basic reminders. Add an appointment reminder (e.g. 24 hours before the appointment, via email or SMS). Add an intake reminder (e.g. 3 days after the form is sent if the client hasn't completed it). Add an invoice reminder. Add a portal invite reminder. Each reminder respects the workflow it's attached to, if you disable the parent workflow, the reminders stop too.

One plan caveat to flag: Workflows is visible on the Free plan, but Free users cannot send SMS reminders, cannot send automated email reminders, and cannot edit workflow or message templates. If your practice is on Plus or Advanced you have full access. Lock this in before launch.

Documentation defaults and AI Scribe standards

A group practice writes notes faster when everyone uses the same template structure. Set the defaults at the workspace level before launch, so nobody invents their own format.

Start with a team-wide note template. SOAP or DAP are the common starting points, pick one based on your dominant specialty. Mental health teams usually default to DAP, physical health teams to SOAP. Build the template once in Templates, then make sure clinicians know to use it. There's no enforcement, but a shared default plus a five-minute team walkthrough is usually enough.

Next, audit your intake template library. The forms in the default intake folder are what every new client receives via the Send intake workflow. Strip it back to the essentials: a consent form, an intake questionnaire, anything jurisdictionally required, and maybe a payment authorisation. Practices often pile templates in here until new clients receive seven forms on day one and complete zero. Three to five forms is a better baseline. Move anything that's clinician-specific or condition-specific out of the default folder, those get sent manually when needed.

If your team uses AI Scribe, standardise the settings before clinicians start recording. Set a default note template (the same SOAP or DAP you chose above), a writing perspective (1st person, 3rd person, or clinical format), and a verbosity level (concise, standard, detailed, or super detailed). Inconsistent AI Scribe settings across a team mean inconsistent notes across the chart, which becomes a headache at supervision or audit time.

Finally, a brief on the team channel about your conventions: how to title sessions, how to handle no-shows in the calendar, what tags to use on client profiles, what file naming pattern to use for uploaded documents. Five minutes of written convention saves hours of cleanup over the first month.

Soft launch and the first week's metrics

Don't open the workspace to real clients on launch day. Run a one-clinician dummy week with test clients first.

Create two or three test clients with your own emails (or alternate addresses you can access). Book them into different services across different clinicians and different locations. Then walk the full flow yourself:

The booking confirmation lands in the test client's inbox. The appointment reminder fires at the configured interval. The intake forms send and arrive correctly. The portal invite lands and the test client can sign up. The appointment appears on the assigned clinician's calendar with the correct location. After the session, an invoice can be generated and a payment processed (use a test card if you're testing Stripe). The clinician can write and sign a note, and the note attaches to the right client.

If anything breaks, the troubleshooting checklist for missing booking slots is: service has online booking enabled, service has a location attached, service has the clinician in assigned team, clinician has availability that overlaps with the requested time, clinician has the service ticked in their Services and availability tab. Five things, in that order.

Then brief the team for real launch. Schedule a 30-minute team session before go-live: walk through the booking link, show where notes are stored, show how to handle a cancellation, show how to send a manual intake form. Don't try to teach everything, focus on the daily-driver flows.

Go live on a Monday. Watch the first week carefully. Track three things: bookings completed without manual intervention, intake forms completed before first session, and time from session end to note signed. These three tell you whether the workspace is actually saving the team time. If any of the three is trending the wrong way at end of week one, the system isn't broken, your defaults are wrong, and you can adjust the templates, reminders, or workflows without re-onboarding anyone.