The setting that quietly stops patients booking your doctor
You have added a doctor. Their name, email and speciality are all filled in. They appear in your team list. And yet they cannot sign in, or patients cannot book them, or both.
This is almost never a bug. It is two separate switches, both of which start in the off position, and neither of which announces itself.
Two switches, two different problems
The confusion comes from treating "the doctor is set up" as one thing. It is two.
Can they sign in? A team member has an active flag that controls whether they can log in to the front desk at all. It defaults to off. A member you have just invited exists, looks complete in the list, and will be refused at the login screen until you turn it on.
Can patients book them? That is separate. A clinician can be perfectly able to sign in and still not appear as bookable, because being bookable depends on the clinic, the services and the schedule rather than on their login.
The fix depends entirely on which one you are hitting, so it is worth being precise about the symptom before changing anything.
If they cannot sign in
The symptom is at the login screen — correct email, correct password, refused anyway.
Open the team member in your front desk and look for the active state. If it says the member is inactive or cannot sign in, that is your answer. Switching it on takes effect immediately; they do not need a new invitation and their password does not need resetting.
Two things worth knowing:
- Active is not the same as invited. Sending an invitation creates the account. It does not activate it.
- Active seats usually count against your plan. If your plan caps the number of active members, activating someone can take you to or past that cap. That is a decision for you to make knowingly rather than something to discover later, so check your current count first.
If they can sign in but nobody can book them
Now the login works and the doctor still does not appear as an option to patients. Work through these in order, because each one depends on the one before it.
Is the doctor attached to a clinic? A doctor is not bookable in the abstract. They are bookable at a location. If your business has more than one clinic, a doctor attached only to the Andheri clinic will never appear when a patient is booking at Koramangala.
Does the clinic have services? Patients book a service, not a person. A clinic with no services attached has nothing for anyone to choose, so the doctor behind those services never surfaces.
Does the doctor have a schedule? This is the one people miss most often. Availability is set per doctor per clinic — it is not a property of the doctor alone. A doctor working at two of your locations needs a schedule at each. A doctor with no schedule has no slots, and no slots means no booking, regardless of everything else being correct.
Are they suspended from booking? Separately from the sign-in flag, a member can be suspended, which hides them from patient booking while leaving their login intact. It is the right switch when someone is on leave and the wrong explanation to go hunting for when you have simply not set a schedule.
Why it is built this way
It reads like friction, and to be fair it sometimes is. The reasoning is that the two states answer genuinely different questions.
A receptionist who has left should lose their login immediately, but you probably do not want their name scrubbed from last month's appointments. A doctor on three weeks' leave should stop appearing to patients without losing access to their own notes. Collapsing those into one on/off switch means one of those cases has to be handled badly.
Defaulting the login flag to off is deliberate for the same reason: creating an account and granting access are different decisions, and a system that grants access the moment someone types an email address is a system that eventually grants it to the wrong person.
The quick checklist
When a doctor is not bookable, in this order:
- Is the member active? If not, that is your sign-in problem, and nothing else matters until it is fixed.
- Are they attached to the clinic the patient is booking at?
- Does that clinic have services?
- Does the doctor have a schedule at that clinic?
- Are they suspended from booking?
Four out of five times it is the schedule, and the reason is that the schedule is the only one of the five that has to be set per location rather than once.
Written against how VaidX behaves today. If your front desk does not match what is described here, the product has moved on and this article has not — tell us and we will correct it.