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Install the Exchange client and configure for your particular version of Outlook. Next, use the Calendar feature to make appointments and use the Reminder feature to automatically issue reminders.

You might want to look into doing it with Access.
You'll have a lot more flexibility.

The key to this would be deciding how you want to handle the appointments on a system-wide basis. Do you want each individual doctor to have his/her own calendar that is private and not seen by other doctors? Or do you want to use one or more public calendars that everyone can see and manage? If you answer the first question "yes," then you can use the calendar that is part of each doctor's own mailbox to schedule his/her appointments and they can allow any others in the office (i.e., receptionist, nurses, etc.) access to their calendar(s) for the purpose of scheduling their appts. If you want more public access, then set up a single public calendar for all appts. for all doctors, or you could also set up a separate public calendar for each doctor that is accessible to everyone. You can still control level of access, if you want, so that only certain people can schedule or change appts., but you can more easily make the calendar(s) visible to everyone. You might also want to set up a public contacts folder to contain all of the contact information for your patients - that way when a patient calls, you can bring up their contact info and easily schedule an appointment for them by selecting Actions/New Appt. with Contact from the menu.

Keep in mind that you could make this really slick if you learn how to design custom forms and toolbars for your users, so that you could customize the information that is stored for each contact (patient) and you could have a one-button click to schedule an appt. for the active contact.

Have fun!! Hope this helps!