🚨 Important - This feature is currently in beta and is not widely available in Dentally.
Can I send booking confirmations automatically after booking an appointment?
If you have automatic booking confirmation enabled, you can allow confirmation messages to be sent to patients shortly after you book their appointment, to verify the date and time. These messages can be sent via SMS or email. Depending on your practice's setup, you can either send them for every booking by default, or see a pop-up after every booking.
These are different from appointment confirmations, which are sent shortly before the appointment asking the patient to confirm attendance.
📝 Please note: If one communication channel is not possible for a patient (eg. they don't have a mobile number on their patient record), confirmation won't be sent via that channel even if automatic confirmations are enabled.
How do I send a booking confirmation using the confirmation window?
Depending on how your practice has confirmations set up, booking confirmations might send automatically after every booking, or you might be prompted first whenever you book an appointment.
If you are set up to be prompted every time, you will see a confirmation window after booking:
Start by booking an appointment (there are several ways to do this).
Once the appointment is saved, a pop-up appears asking whether to send the patient their appointment details. You will only see this reminder window if you do not have automatic confirmations enabled.
Check or uncheck 'SMS' and 'Email' to choose which channels to use.
Both are selected by default.
You must select at least one channel in order to send a confirmation.
The confirmation message the patient receives will be dictated by the template selected. The contents of the message cannot be changed from within this window. To make changes you or someone from your team will need to edit the original template.
📝 Please note: Messages are not sent immediately. There is a 10-minute delay after you click 'Send' before the SMS or email goes out. This allows some buffer time in case changes need to be made (eg. an incorrect booking), to avoid the patient receiving multiple confirmation messages.
Click 'Send' to queue the message on the selected channels.
Click 'Cancel' if you do not want to send a confirmation. If you click 'Cancel', the appointment will still be booked as expected - only the confirmation will be cancelled.
After clicking 'Send', the messages are held in a queue and sent automatically after 10 minutes. If you make changes to the appointment within that 10 minutes, the queued message will be updated to reflect the changes and the 10 minutes will reset.
If an appointment date or start time is moved after that first 10 minutes, the same confirmation window will appear. Clicking 'Send' will send a new message to the patient, confirming the updated details (even if they received one before when it was originally booked.
If the duration of the appointment is changed, but the start time/date remain the same, you won't be prompted to confirm.
🚨 Important: If you don't want to see the pop-up every time you book, this can be adjusted by Level 4 users in the automation settings.