Today’s appointments and starting a consult
The one-day diary on your dashboard and in Capture, how it decides what ‘today’ is, and how one tap starts a consult on the right patient.
Cliniko and Nookal connections require a paid plan.
Once your practice software is connected, today’s booked appointments are one tap away from a consult — on the dashboard and at the top of Capture — without going through Settings first.
The card shows one day, across every practice system you have connected, in time order. Each row names the patient, the system it came from, the appointment type and the location. Nothing on it is read in the background: the list loads when you ask for it. Small Mercy does not persist the diary in its database, but keeps returned rows, including patient names, in each gateway worker’s memory for up to five minutes so you can return without another practice-software read.
A row is ready when it offers Start consult. A row that cannot start says why instead — the states are listed below.
Loading the list
Choose Load today’s list. Small Mercy reads each connected system’s diary for today and shows what came back.
- Refresh reads again. The list is otherwise kept warm for five minutes, so returning to the dashboard within that time does not cost another read of your practice software.
- If one connected system could not be read, its rows are missing and the card says so. Small Mercy does not pretend the rest of the list is the whole day.
- An empty day reads Nothing booked for today only when every connected system actually answered. If one did not, the card says the list could not be read and that nothing on it is a statement about your day.
What ‘today’ means
Today is decided by one practice clock for the whole list, not the device you are holding. If you have a connected Nookal account and a mapped location with a usable time zone, that location’s time zone sets the day for both Nookal and Cliniko rows. Otherwise Small Mercy uses your organisation’s clinic time zone (or its configured service fallback).
With both systems connected, a Cliniko appointment near midnight may therefore fall on the date at your Nookal location rather than the date at your organisation’s clinic.
The card keeps checking that the day has not moved on underneath it. If you load the list before midnight at the practice and look again after, the heading stops saying Today and shows the date the list was loaded for, with a note asking you to refresh. If this browser genuinely cannot work out what day it is at the practice, the card says that too rather than guessing — the list, the times and the date all still render; only the word “Today” is withheld.
Starting a consult from a row
Choose Start consult on the appointment. Small Mercy prepares the consult against that exact patient and practice-software appointment, then takes you to Capture with the patient already attached.
Preparing is a round-trip to your practice software, and Small Mercy holds the Start button while it happens, so you cannot begin recording against a session that is still being set up. If you navigate away during it, Small Mercy does not move you back.
Consent is unchanged: the consult still begins with consent before recording, exactly as it would without an integration.
When a row cannot start a consult
Small Mercy would rather stop than guess, so a row that cannot be used says why in place of the button:
- Restore patient — the Small Mercy patient this appointment is linked to has been archived. Restore the patient in Small Mercy, or link the appointment to a different one from the integration page.
- Choose note template — your practice software connection has no usable draft-note template right now, so a note from this consult could not be filed back. Set the template on the integration page first; see How do I connect Nookal? or How do I connect Cliniko?.
- Link patient — the practice-software patient on this appointment has not been linked to a Small Mercy patient yet. Choose it to open the integration page at that appointment, then confirm or add the Small Mercy patient. Nothing is linked automatically.
- Unavailable — that system could not answer for this row right now; hover the chip for the reason. The row will be back on the next refresh that succeeds.
What the card never does
- It never reads your diary on its own — not on sign-in, not on a timer, not when the page opens.
- It never creates, moves or edits an appointment in your practice software.
- It never links a patient for you. The link is always a step you take, on the integration page, once per patient.
Still stuck?
Email support@smallmercy.app — or see the contact page. Service status lives at status.smallmercy.app.