How to Offer Same-Day Appointments and Walk-Ins Without Overbooking Your Schedule

This article is based on an episode of the Scaling Practice Management podcast: “ER Doctor Turned CEO on Building a Culture That Heals,” with guest Dr. Joy Evers, MD, founder and CEO of Healthtopia Clinics. Watch the full conversation below.

It now takes an average of 31 days to land a physician appointment across the largest U.S. metros – up from 26 days in 2022 (AMN Healthcare, 2025). For family medicine specifically, the wait is around 23 days. For a patient who is worried, in pain, or new in town, that may as well be forever. Most of them won’t wait – they’ll call the next practice on the list.

So the practice that can answer “Can you be seen today?” with a yes holds a real advantage. The catch is doing it without turning the schedule into chaos.

Dr. Joy Evers has cracked it. A board-certified emergency physician, she’s the founder and CEO of Healthtopia Clinics – an integrative primary care group with four locations serving about 35,000 patients across Southern California. 

Her team offers same-day appointments and walk-ins on top of an already full schedule, and they pull it off by deliberately designing slack into the calendar rather than booking every slot solid. Here’s how they do it.

Key takeaways

• Long wait times push patients to competitors. Same-day access is a growth lever, not just a courtesy.
• The trick isn’t working harder – it’s building a buffer into the schedule so there’s room to say yes.
• Slightly longer appointment slots can absorb walk-ins and reduce future no-shows.
• Same-day access only works if the phone gets answered in the first place – which is a strong case for putting an AI receptionist like Talkie.ai in place.

The access gap is your competitor’s opportunity

For Healthtopia, speed of access is a core promise, not an extra.

Patients hearing that it could be 12 weeks to get an appointment is exactly what turns them away. Every one who can’t get in soon is a booking that goes somewhere else. Closing that gap is crucial.

Build the buffer into your schedule

The most common objection to same-day slots is that they wreck a packed calendar. Dr. Evers flips that logic. Instead of squeezing appointments as tight as possible, she deliberately leaves room:

This is the practical version of what the American Academy of Family Physicians calls advanced or open access scheduling – the principle of doing “today’s work today” by holding capacity open rather than booking every slot weeks out. The buffer is what makes a walk-in a “sure, come in” instead of a “sorry, we’re full.”

Longer slots aren’t wasted time

It sounds counterintuitive that longer appointments help you fit more patients in. But the buffer does double duty. It gives providers time to do the visit well, and it leaves slack to absorb the unplanned.

There’s a retention payoff, too. A 2025 study of a Texas health-center network found that patients who got more time with their physician were meaningfully less likely to miss their next appointment – roughly a 10% drop in the odds of a no-show for each additional standard block of time (American Journal of Managed Care, 2025). Fewer no-shows means fewer holes in tomorrow’s schedule, which makes the whole system more forgiving.

For Dr. Evers, the willingness to flex comes straight from the emergency department:

Where to start

You don’t need to rebuild your calendar overnight. Start small: 

• hold back a share of each day’s slots for same-day requests, 
• add a few minutes of buffer to your standard appointment length, 
• track how many walk-ins and urgent calls you’re actually able to absorb,
• adjust from there.

One thing worth checking before any of it matters: whether the phone gets answered when a patient calls to ask for that same-day slot. Open capacity does no good if the call goes to voicemail after hours or during a lunch rush. That’s a strong case for putting an AI receptionist like Talkie.ai in place – so every request reaches a real answer and lands in an open slot, no matter who’s at the front desk.

Same-day access isn’t about running your team ragged. It’s about designing a little room to say yes – and letting that yes become the reason patients choose you over the practice down the road.

Keep going

Dr. Evers covered far more than scheduling in this episode – how she built a culture that heals from the top down, how her providers run real-time curbside consults across conventional and integrative medicine, and why she chose insurance-based care over direct primary care. Watch the full episode of Scaling Practice Management here.