Hopefully your practice is taking full advantage of the Dentrix Ascend practice communications suite and is sending out automated text message notifications to your patients to confirm their upcoming appointments. When Dentrix Ascend requests a confirmation response, most patients will text back a “1” to confirm, and that’s that. However, some patients will actually text a reply. Now what?
The next step is to view the patient reply and take any action that it requires. You can see all related messages in the context of an appointment and not miss any important responses. Dentrix Ascend notifies you of messages received by displaying a red dot next to your user name in the blue menu bar. The number in the dot represents the total number of unread messages.
How to:
Click (or tap) the red notification dot next to your user name in the blue menu bar to open the Inbox page. Alternatively, you can follow Home > Inbox.
The Inbox page opens.
Unread messages are in bold italic text.
After you have read the message, click Mark as Read to indicate you read it.
If there is nothing else to do, hide the message from the Inbox by clicking the Hide icon. If you do need to respond to the message, the mobile phone number displays along with the message, if you want to call or text the primary contact from your office phone. For more information, the primary contact name is a hyperlink to the Patient Information page, and the next appointment date and time hyperlink opens the appointment detail panel in the Calendar.
Additional Information
This basic feature does NOT include two-way texting; you can see patient messages but not respond to them from within the platform.
Dentrix Ascend sends “patient” communications to the primary contact rather than to the patient.
The number in the dot represents the total number of unread messages. Note that this number goes down when any team member marks a message as read.
To see the text message notification, your user role must have the new Review inbox messages right. This ensures that team members tasked with monitoring patient text responses will see it, and team members who do not have that task will not be bothered by it.
