Concurrency Rules

In simple terms, concurrency rules determine whether appointments can be double booked or stacked within a schedule.

These rules help clinics manage scheduling flexibility while maintaining appropriate provider workload.

Concurrency refers to how many appointments are allowed to occur during the same time window.

For example:

If the number of overlapping appointments would exceed the rule, the system will prevent the appointment from being scheduled.

Concurrency rules are often used to support operational scheduling policies like:

Preventing double booking

Many clinics want to ensure that providers are only seeing one patient at a time.

In this case, the rule would set the maximum concurrency to 1.

Allowing controlled double booking

Some clinics allow double booking under certain circumstances, such as:

In these cases, concurrency can be increased to allow additional overlapping appointments.

Restricting overlap for specific visit types

Concurrency rules can also be targeted to specific services or patient types using scopes.

For example, a clinic might want to prevent double booking for initial evaluations, even if other visits can overlap.

When creating a concurrency rule, you define the maximum number of appointments that can overlap.

Once the rule is active, the scheduling system will check this rule whenever availability is shown for a new appointment.

If adding the appointment would exceed the concurrency limit, booking will not be allowed for that slot.

Concurrency rules become more powerful when combined with scopes.

Scopes allow you to apply the rule to specific conditions such as:

For example, you could create a rule that prevents double booking for:

Scopes allow you to control scheduling policies with much greater precision.

All booking rules contain two advanced settings called Skip and Valid Until. Read more on how those are used in this article.

Concurrency rules control how many appointments can overlap at the same time for a provider.