Initial setup

The bot can only offer what you have configured. This is the minimum, in the order worth following.

1. Specialty

In Configuration, check the specialty field. It's free text and the bot uses it to introduce itself. Write it lowercase and singular, the way a person would say it: odontología, dermatología, medicina general.

2. Doctors and schedules

In Doctors, add each professional who sees patients by appointment.

For each one, define the weekly schedule: which days and which time bands. This schedule is the only source of the slots the bot offers. A doctor with no schedule gives the bot nothing to propose.

Two things people routinely forget:

• Lunch. If they work 09:00–13:00 and 15:00–18:00, enter two separate bands. Enter 09:00–18:00 straight through and the bot will offer 14:00.
• Saturdays. If the clinic works Saturdays, it has to be marked explicitly.

Time off — holidays, conferences, clinic-specific closures — is entered on the same screen. See Doctors and time off.

3. Procedures

In Configuration, the procedures section is the catalogue of reasons a patient can request an appointment. Every clinic builds its own; there is no fixed list.

Your clinic starts with a generic catalogue — consulta, control, procedimiento, otro — which is fine to test with but should be replaced with your specialty's real reasons as soon as possible.

Each procedure has:

• A code: internal, short, no spaces. It's what gets stored on the appointment.
• A label: what the patient and your team read. Write it in plain Spanish: Limpieza dental, Control post-operatorio, Primera consulta.
• An optional intake form, see below.

The bot always asks the reason before offering times, and asks by showing this list. So the labels are worth writing for a patient, not for staff.

A catalogue of five to ten procedures works better than one of thirty: WhatsApp renders short lists far better, and patients choose faster.

4. Intake forms

Optional but useful. An intake form is a short questionnaire the bot sends over WhatsApp after the patient confirms their appointment.

You build them in Configuration. Each question is free text or single-choice. You can have one default form for the whole clinic and different forms per procedure.

Answers arrive in the dashboard and, if you configure it, at a webhook or a staff WhatsApp group. Detailed in Intake forms.

Intake answers are the only health data Pingclínica stores, and they are deleted automatically 72 hours after the appointment. If your clinic needs to keep them, you must download them or receive them by webhook before then.

5. Patients

The bot only converses with registered patients. Before announcing the number to your patients, load the initial roster from Patients. You can add them one by one, and they are also created automatically when your team books an appointment against a new phone number.

Explained in Patients.

Checklist

Before giving the number to patients:

• The specialty reads the way you want a patient to read it
• Every doctor has a weekly schedule, with lunch separated out
• The procedure catalogue reflects real reasons for visiting
• You ran a full conversation from a registered phone
• The test appointment appeared in the dashboard at the right time
• You deleted the test appointment