Book Appointment, Telehealth or Referral

Who / when: a Scheduler or Provider (front desk, scheduler, intake admin, or a clinician) at the moment they need to put something on the calendar — a clinic visit, a video consult, or a referral to another clinician. Veona uses one booking form for all three, and it quietly changes its own fields to match what you pick first. You never hunt for a separate screen.

A quick word on the three things you can book here. An in-person appointment is a normal clinic visit on a given day and time. A telehealth consult is a remote visit over video or audio, and booking one spins up a secure Veona Live join link for the patient. A referral is a clinical document that sends a patient on to another clinician or facility — it is not a calendar slot, it is signed and sent (more on that below). The form knows the difference and shows you only the fields each one needs.

1. Scheduler / Provider — open Appointments → Booking. The form opens at step “1 · Booking type”.
2. Scheduler / Provider — choose one of the three tiles: “In-person”, “Telehealth”, or “Referral”. The moment you pick, the later steps of the form rebuild themselves for that choice — this is what “type-aware” means.
3. For an in-person visit — pick the patient, the provider, the date, the time, and the visit type (New, Follow-up, or Review). Then press “Book appointment”. It lands on the staff schedule.
4. For a telehealth consult — pick the patient, the provider, the date, the time, the modality (Video or Audio), and the reason. Then press “Schedule consult”. Veona creates the consult and sends the patient a secure join link on their chosen channel. (The full telehealth flow continues in Schedule a Telehealth Visit and Spin Up the Consult.)
5. For a referral — set the referral fields (patient, urgency, direction, and the referral detail), then sign and send it with your eSign PIN — a 6-digit signing code, separate from your login password, that binds your signature to the document. The referral leg has its own page because the signature is what makes it real: see eSign a Referral With Your PIN.

Note

Picking the booking type first is deliberate. An in-person slot, a video consult, and a referral are genuinely different objects in Veona — they have different fields, different downstream effects, and different rules. The single form keeps you from learning three screens; the changing steps keep each one honest.

Tip

A patient can be booked any number of ways over time — a follow-up appointment, a telehealth review, a referral to a specialist — and they all hang off the same patient record (their UHID — Unique Health ID, the permanent hospital number). You never re-enter the patient; you pick them once.

What happens next: an in-person or telehealth booking appears on Appointments → Schedule for the chosen provider, ready to be checked in on the day (see Check In an Appointment Into an Encounter). A referral, once signed, lands on Appointments → Referrals and notifies the receiving provider and the patient — and when the receiving provider accepts it, it becomes a real follow-up appointment.

Follow the trail

• Next: eSign a Referral With Your PIN · Schedule a Telehealth Visit and Spin Up the Consult
• Related: Create and Notify a Referral · eSign a Referral With Your PIN · A Patient’s First Visit, End to End