Patients today are busy and need reminders so they don’t forget their appointments. When a patient breaks an appointment, it costs you money. In addition to sending text messages and emails to confirm appointments, most practices may still need to contact the patient if the email and text did not get a response. Dentrix Ascend gives you tools to locate patients who have not confirmed their appointment. Reach out to these patients to reduce the likelihood of broken appointments.

How to:

1. From the Schedule menu, select Unconfirmed Appointments.

The page opens to today’s date by default. You can look a day ahead or a week ahead according to the workflow in your office for checking patient confirmations; the page has the same date navigation tools as the Calendar.

Here is what you see:

A. Patients listed are scheduled for the date showing at the top of the calendar.

B. Patients are grouped by primary contact, so you only need to make one phone call for patients who are from the same household and are scheduled for the same day.

C. Patients are also sorted by their appointment times.

2. Begin calling patients who are listed at the top of the list first since they are expected to arrive earlier in the day versus patients who are farther down on the list and should be arriving later in the day. Do one of the following:

• If you confirm an appointment, select the checkbox next to the patient’s name, and then click Confirm.
• If you leave a message, select the checkbox next to the patient’s name, and then click Left Message. Then, send an email by clicking the email link before moving on to the next patient.

The appointment’s note and status are updated automatically with the date and time when you contacted or attempted to contact the patient.

 Here is an example of confirming an appointment:

The appointment moves to the Confirmed location. If you want to see or check, scroll down on the same page to view.

Here is an example of leaving a message:

The unconfirmed appointments page automatically updates the schedule. There you will see status updates and notes on the patient appointment and the patient appointment card.

Additional Information

• If an appointment’s status is “Left Message,” you can change the status to “Confirmed” when the patient confirms the appointment.
• To learn more about confirming appointments, watch Confirming Appointments in the Resource Center.