Calendar subscription

Rehab → Outpatient → Schedule, then Subscribe to this schedule, and create a subscription. You get a URL. Every Rehab user can set up their own; it does not need an administrator.

• Google Calendar: Other calendars → From URL
• Outlook: Add calendar → Subscribe from web
• Apple Calendar: File → New Calendar Subscription

The URL is shown once. ArkCloud stores only a one-way hash of it, so it cannot be looked up again by you or by us. If you lose it, create a new subscription and revoke the old one.

Treat the URL like a password: anyone who has it can read your schedule without signing in. That is how calendar subscriptions work everywhere — there is no way for Google’s servers to log in as you — which is why revoking is one click.

By default the feed shows when, how long and what kind of appointment — and nothing that identifies a patient.

That is deliberate. A subscribed calendar is fetched by Google’s, Microsoft’s or Apple’s servers and stored on them. Putting patient names in it means sending patient information to a company your practice may have no agreement with, repeatedly, on a timer, with nobody watching.

You can turn names on per subscription. The screen asks you to confirm, and the change is recorded in the audit trail — because “when did this start carrying patient names?” is the first question anyone reviewing a disclosure will ask.

Note what the feed still reveals with names off: that somebody has an appointment, at a time, for a named service. “Initial psychiatric assessment, 2pm” is not nothing. That is why each subscription can be revoked on its own.

ArkCloud publishes; it does not read anything back. Moving or deleting an appointment in your calendar app changes your copy only — the practice’s schedule is untouched, and at the next refresh your copy returns to matching ArkCloud.

This is not calendar sync, and it is not a Google or Microsoft integration. Two-way updates would let an appointment be moved from a phone with no permission check, no availability check and no record of who did it.

Your own appointments — the ones where you are the clinician — from 30 days ago to 90 days ahead. There is no whole-practice or shared feed, because that would put every patient’s appointment on one person’s phone.

Cancelled appointments stay in the feed marked as cancelled rather than disappearing. If they simply vanished, a calendar that had already downloaded one would keep it forever, and you would arrive for a visit nobody else believes in.

How often your calendar refreshes is up to your calendar provider. ArkCloud asks for hourly; Google in particular often takes longer and there is nothing either of us can do about it.

Revoking stops the URL working immediately. Any calendar subscribed to it stops updating, and its existing entries stay until the person removes the calendar.

Revoke when a device is lost, when someone leaves, or if the URL has been pasted somewhere it should not have been. The record that the subscription existed is kept, so the question “where did this calendar come from” stays answerable.