This article explains what a Consult Booking is, and the one piece of setup it needs from you — a link from your clinic's website to your ClinicMonk™ consult calendar.
What happens once someone books — the confirmations, the reminders, and the follow-up after the call — is covered in separate articles.
What a Consult Booking is
A Consult Booking is your consult calendar, and everything ClinicMonk™ runs off it.
Someone on your website click through and picks a time that suits them. From that one action, ClinicMonk™ confirms the booking with them by text and email, reminds them in the days and hours before the call, creates or moves their lead to Consult Booked in your pipeline, and emails your clinic administrator to say there's a call to be on. After the call, once someone on your team marks whether the person turned up, it sends the follow-up that matches that outcome.
It sits in front of your EHR rather than inside it. The consult call is the step between a new lead and a paid appointment with a therapist, and a Consult Booking is what carries someone across it without your admin chasing anybody.
The one thing it needs from you
The calendar doesn't appear on your website on its own. ClinicMonk™ hosts it at its own address, and your website has to point at it.
Until that link exists, nothing arrives. The calendar is live and the automation is ready, but nobody can reach it. This is the most common reason a new clinic sees an empty pipeline in its first week.
It's a one-time job, and it's usually the last step of setup.
Your booking link
Once set up, your consult calendar lives at:
connect.yourclinicdomain.com/consult-booking-calendar
Replace yourclinicdomain.com with your clinic's own domain — the same one your website uses. A clinic at brightpaththerapy.com would send people to connect.brightpaththerapy.com/consult-booking-calendar.
It's an ordinary web address, so it works anywhere a link works: a button on your website, your email signature, your Psychology Today profile, your Google Business profile, the link in your Instagram bio. Every booking arrives the same way regardless of where the link was clicked.
Putting it on your website
Add a button to your website that opens that address, labelled Book a Free Consult Call.
Most clinic owners don't do this part themselves. If someone else looks after your website — a web manager, a designer, or whoever built the site — send them two things: the address above, and the button wording. That's everything they need. It takes a few minutes for anyone who works on websites regularly, and it needs nothing from ClinicMonk™ at their end. There's no plugin to install, no account to create, and no code to embed.
If you edit your own site, add a button in your site builder the way you'd add any other, and set its link to the address above.
Whether the button opens the calendar in the same tab or a new one is up to you. Neither changes what ClinicMonk™ does with the booking.
Check it works
Do this once, after the button goes live. A test booking is a real booking — it creates a real lead and sends real messages — so use your own name, email address and mobile number, and the messages come to you instead of to a stranger.
Open the address in a private or incognito browser window. The calendar should load and show your available times. If nothing loads, the address is wrong or the button hasn't been published yet.
Check the time zone shown on the booking page, then confirm the available times match your intended clinic hours. Visitors may see times converted to their own time zone.
Go to your website and click the button. It should land on that same calendar.
Book a consult using your own details.
Check you receive the confirmation text and the confirmation email, subject Your consult call is confirmed.
Check your clinic administrator receives the email with the subject New Consultation Appointment Booked, and that the link inside it opens your appointments list.
Open your pipeline and confirm the lead is sitting in Consult Booked.
When you're done, mark the test appointment No Show. That clears it out of Consult Booked, and it lets you watch the follow-up start — which is worth seeing once, because it's the half of the feature that only runs when someone marks the outcome. Once you've seen it, you can set the test lead's status to Lost so it isn't sitting on your board.
What happens next
With the link live, the rest of a Consult Booking runs on its own. Three other articles in this section cover it: what ClinicMonk™ sends between the booking and the call, what your team needs to do on the day, and what the follow-up looks like for each outcome once the appointment is marked.