Clinic appointments in Google Calendar, read-only

Appointments go out to the practitioner's calendar. Nothing comes back in. An event they create in their own calendar does not block clinic time, does not appear in online booking, and cannot move a patient's appointment.

That limit is the design, not a shortcut. The clinic calendar has one author: your team, working in the admin panel. The moment a personal calendar can write into it, a dentist appointment on somebody's phone can silently remove a patient's slot, and nobody can say afterward what happened. Blocking clinic time is done in Team, under time off, which is visible to everyone who needs to see it.

It is worth being precise, because the word gets used loosely. This is not a Google Calendar integration and there is no two-way sync.

It is a subscription feed in the standard calendar format, which Google, Apple and Microsoft have all supported for years. Nobody signs in to a Google account, no permissions are granted to anyone, and your clinic is not depending on a connection that can be revoked by a vendor. It keeps working in whatever calendar the practitioner actually uses, including the one they switch to next year.

A subscription feed cannot ask who is reading it, so the secret in the address is what keeps it private. That has one practical consequence worth understanding: anyone who has the address can read that practitioner's day.

So it is shared once, with the practitioner it belongs to, and treated the way you would treat a password. If it gets out, or a phone is lost, or somebody leaves your clinic, replacing the secret is a single action that stops every existing copy at once. That is a cleaner answer than trying to work out where a copy might have ended up.

The appointments in that practitioner's day: when they start, how long they run, the treatment and the patient. Enough to plan a life around, on whichever screen they already look at.

It is not a clinical record and it is not a replacement for the admin panel. Marking a visit completed or missed, writing it up, or checking who has arrived still happens in the admin panel and on the front desk screen, where the rest of the day's work lives.

Visiting practitioners who work at your clinic two days a week and somewhere else the rest of the time. Clinic owners who want their own day on their own phone without opening an admin panel. Anyone who plans their week in a calendar app rather than on paper.

For a practitioner who is in the building all day, My day is usually more useful: it shows who is waiting, for how long, and who is with them right now. The feed is for the hours they are not at the clinic.