As a dental practice, you want to ensure that your patients are attending their scheduled appointments. Confirmations in Engagement can help streamline this process by automating the appointment confirmation process. Here's how confirmations in Engagement work with a dental practice's practice management software.
While you are turning on automated appointment reminders in your settings, you can customize when and how often patient's are being sent confirmation requests.
Learn how to set up automated appointment reminders here.
Engagement sends confirmation requests to the patient via email or text message. The confirmation message includes the appointment details, such as the date, time, and location.
To learn how to change the confirmation message, click here.
You can send up to three confirmation requests and customize the timing increments between them.
When the patient receives the confirmation message, Engagement operates based on specific keywords, including C, Confirm, Yes, Okay, Ok, Si, Confirmed, I’ll be there, or the emoji '👍.' If a patient responds with a message that contains other phrasing, such as "I confirm I will be there," Engagement will not be able to automatically update the appointment status. This will need to be manually recorded in your practice management software. If not, the patient will receive an additional confirmation request. Cancellations will need to be manually recorded in your practice management software as well.
If the patient confirms using one of the appropriate key words, the software updates the appointment status to "confirmed" in the practice management software. If the patient does not respond to the confirmation request, nothing happens in the practice management software.
If your practice uses a customized confirmation status and wants to change the appointment status to something other than confirmed or cancelled, they can reach out to support.
It's important to note that these confirmation customizations only apply to Dentrix and OpenDental. Note that Eaglesoft does not allow for customized appointment statuses so confirmation statuses cannot be customized in Engagement.
Once an appointment is confirmed, the patient will not receive any additional confirmation request messages for that appointment. If the patient has not confirmed prior to the final appointment reminder, they will be asked to confirm in the appointment reminder notification.