As a dental practice, you want to ensure that your patients are attending their scheduled appointments. Appointment confirmation notifications 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.
In this article, we'll go over:
Customize Confirmation Requests
While you are turning on automated appointment reminders in your Engagement 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 verbiage, click here.
You can send up to three confirmation requests and customize the timing increments between them.
Confirmation Message Verbiage
When the patient receives a confirmation request, Engagement recognizes only the following confirmation-based responses:
C
Confirm
Yes
Okay
Ok
Si
Confirmed
I’ll be there
👍 emoji
Patients can respond and confirm their appointment using any of the recognized confirmation-based responses but they cannot respond to cancel their appointment. Engagement does not recognize cancellation-based responses from patients. We recommend including instructions in your verbiage which instructs patients to call your practice should they need to reschedule their appointment.
To ensure that your patients clearly understand the required response needed in order to confirm their appointment, it's important to ensure that your message verbiage clearly states the action item. To learn how to change confirmation message verbiage, click here.
If the patient confirms using one of the recognized 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.
Dentrix and Open Dental Users: If your practice uses a customized confirmation status and wants to change the appointment status to something other than confirmed or cancelled, please reach out to Dental Intelligence support.
Note for Eaglesoft Users: 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 again in the next appointment reminder notification.
Unrecognized Responses That Require Extra Verbiage
If a patient responds with a message that contains unrecognized phrasing that Engagement cannot verify as a confirmation response, Engagement will not be able to automatically update the appointment status.
In this instance, Engagement will reply to a patient with a triggered message when it is suspected that the patient wanted to confirm, but we are not 100% sure.
In the Verbiage settings, be sure to check the Confirmation requests - extra verbiage messaging to set up your practices's extra verbiage message and capture those patients who may respond with a response that can't be recognized by Engagement.
Unconfirmed responses will need to be manually recorded in your practice management software. If not, the patient will receive an additional confirmation request. Cancellations will also need to be manually recorded in your practice management software.
Appointment Confirmations in Patient Chat
Patient confirmation responses to automated appointment reminders will not show up as new unread messages at the top of of the messaging window in Patient Chat. This functionality reduces clogging up your message feed and helps ensure that your practice stays on top of the active messages from patients that needs responses.
Show all communications in patient message thread
If you would like to have confirmation responses to automated appointment reminders show up in each individual thread so that you can see it in the chat history, make sure you click to select the checkbox to show all communications. Selecting this checkbox will include automated responses in the patient chat history.
Click on Patient Chat in the left side menu of Engagement
Use the search bar to locate the patient by name
Click on the patient message thread to open it
Click on the three-dot menu in the up right corner and select Show all communications
