Non-Appointment Confirmations/Pre/Post Op Notifications
All of your appointment reminders are important, and part of being important is making sure they get out to the right patients about the right things. Message Details is where you configure that. Depending on what automated message your working with you'll have different options available to you. For all but Appointment Confirmations and Pre/Post Op, your message details will look very similar to this:

Let's work through this left to right and top to bottom.

Type: The mode of communication you'll be sending this message as. For most automated notifications and reminders you'll have 2 options - text and email.
Update Appointment Status: This is grayed out because only Appointment Confirmations can update the appointment status.
Filter Type: This affects all the filters in the yellow block. Your two choices are "Only send to" and "Send to all but". These options allow you to either include or exclude a specific group type.
Procedure Code(s), Provider(s), Operatory(ies): This allows you to select 1 of the 3 filter types and add values to them.
Summary: This gives you a humanized version of everything listed in the blue box.
Message Timing: This is how you'll decide when the message will go out based on the event that took place. Messages are triggered based on events. Events like setting an appointment, appointment start, appointment completion, recalls coming due, recalls past due, and missed appointments are all monitored by our system so you can trigger messages off of their timing.

Pro Tip:
Operatories have a Master Switch too! To turn off reminders and notifications for any appointments in a specific operatory for all communication points including automated calls, texts, emails go to Settings>Offices>Edit Office (Blue Buttoned Pencil)>Operatories Config Tab and then turn off the operatories you don't want to send any communications to.

Now that you understand how the Message Details work, we'll walk through how to set up a message specifically for hygiene appointment patients.
First, you would decide whether you want to send a text or email and select the appropriate option under Type. Then you would select "Only send to" under Filter Type. Then depending on your practice, you could select procedure codes that only apply to hygiene, a provider who only does hygiene, or an operatory that is only used for hygiene. Then set up when you want it to go out in relation to the event (before or after the appointment, recall, etc).

Appointment Confirmations and Pre/Post Op Reminders

The way that Appointment Confirmations, Pre and Post Op Reminders work is similar to Non-Appointment Confirmations and Pre/Post Op Reminders. The Difference is all in the timing of messages. Why? Appointment confirmations and Pre/Post Op Reminders may need additional communication with the office if schedules change or if there are questions about how to implement a pre-op instruction. As such offices may want to be open to handle any of these questions. So ReminderDental allows you to make very granular decisions about when reminders and notifications go out in these scenarios.

To start you'll want to visit Settings>Offices>Edit Office (Blue Buttoned Pencil)>Messaging Config Tab. At the bottom of this tab, you'll find your Messaging Windows. First, make sure that they are all at the times you want. Appointment Reminder Messages will NOT be sent outside these hours, except for in the case of Last Minute Reminders. These are for your first appointment for the day that may need a reminder before your office opens. Once you have them set correctly, remember to click save at the bottom.

Once those are in order you can set up your Appointment Confirmation Reminders Message Details by going to Communication>Automated Messages>Appointment Reminders>Appointment Confirmations. Your Message Details will look something like this:

This will look similar to the Message Details box above with the addition of the blue Message Timing box now having more options. With the additional options, you can now have a single message go out on different days based on when the appointment is. This is important for helping your patients get their messages when you're in the office. Without this feature, if we set the appointment confirmation message to go out 4 days before the appointment and your patient has an appointment on Wednesday they'll receive their appointment confirmation on Sunday. Let's say they have a scheduling conflict and can't make it on Wednesday. They call in to reset the appointment but find your office closed. Rather than leave a voicemail they decide they'll call tomorrow to reset the appointment. Monday comes, their busy week of work, kids, and life begins and they forget, day after day until Wednesday. You get the picture. So, take advantage of this tool!

Here's how to set it up, if you didn't do it in the wizard (to do it the easy way, go to www.reminderdental.com/wizard and then make sure you select "Only when our office is open" in the "When do you want automated communications to go out to patients?" section)...
First thing to notice is in the top right there's a small blue + button, this will allow you to create a new line if you need to make the scheduling dynamic. Then you have the red trashcan buttons to delete a line you no longer need. Most dental schedules will need 2-3 lines to handle notifications going out on days the office is open.

We usually recommend starting with the minimum amount of days you want this notification to go out before and working up from there. Let's say I'm setting up my 2 day appointment confirmation. This one will be a phone call. So under Type, I'll select Phone. Then Update Appointment Status will be Yes because if the person confirms on the phone, I want it to update my status here in ReminderDental and my practice management system. I'm not applying any filters to this one, so I'll leave the yellow section alone.

In the blue section, I'll start with 2 days before the appointment. If my notifications go out 2 days before the appointment they can't go out for Monday or Tuesday appointments because then the notification will go out on Saturday and Sunday respectively. So I won't select the Monday or Tuesday box for this line. I will select Wed, Thurs, and Fri though because I'm open Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. If you hover over the individual checkboxes a pop-up at the bottom of the blue box shows you when the notification would go out. Now that we have Wed, Thurs and Friday covered we only need to cover appointments on Monday and Tuesday. I could opt to send these reminders out 4 days before and just add one more line, but that means my Monday appointments are getting their reminder on Thursday of the previous week, and Mondays are already crazy as it is, I need closer reminders on Mondays. So I'll make a 3 day for my Monday appointments and a 1 day for my Tuesday appointments. This will allow my patients to confirm the day before on a Tuesday appointment, which isn't ideal, but it's better (to me) than my patient confirming on Friday the week before and forgetting on Tuesday (4 days later). Once I have it all filled out, I can set it and forget it. Now ReminderDental will take care of the heavy lifting for my office!

Don't forget to click Update Details to save your changes.