How to populate fields in a has_many through join table

I have a question concerning active record association, referring to this part of the rails documentation:

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html#the-has_many-through-association

if we have three models:

class Physician < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :appointments
  has_many :patients, :through => :appointments
end

class Appointment < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :physician
  belongs_to :patient
end

class Patient < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :appointments
  has_many :physicians, :through => :appointments
end

The documentation says that the collection of join models can be managed via the api this way:

physician.patients = patients

but what if the appointment model, like in the linked example, has a field called appointment_date and I want to create a new appointment given the Physician and the Patient at a specific date? The following code will create a record in the appointment table, but how to populate the appointment_date too in the third step?

physician = Physician.first
patient = Patients.first
physician.patients << patient

does something like this exists?

physician.patients.create( :patient => patient, 'appointment.appointment_time' => appointment_time )