Open Dental Forum

I see Arrivals was deployed in the 7/7/20 update!

I have a couple of questions, and after spending some time on a support call this afternoon a few of them persist.

1. Why is sending the Arrival text tied to a patient scheduling an appointment? If a patient today schedules a recall visit for January, there's no reason for them to get the Arrival text today. This would be much more functional going out on a "last minute reminder" basis rather than "thanks for scheduling an appointment."

2. If I turn Arrivals on, then unless I use confirmation status rules as a way of blocking the messages, every patient with a future appointment on the schedule is going to get an Arrival text message. So my best course is maybe to only allow sending Arrival messages for appointments with a "confirmed" status in hopes that I won't send hundreds or thousands of text messages and tie up my system?

3. Let's say a mom has her cell phone listed for all her kids so that messages go to her. Then 17-year-old drives herself to an appointment and follows mom's instructions to text "arrived" or "a" or whatever it is to our number. Nothing will happen because the child's phone isn't registered to OpenDental, right? So the patient will just sit in the parking lot thinking that she's checked in until we notice a text that needs a response?

4. Also a note - apparently this feature will only work if an "Arrival" text message was sent automatically from our office, correct? Meaning we can't just tell patients to text "arrived" to us, but the system has to have sent a message to their phone in order for the "arrived" status to work properly?

Thanks! We're excited to use this feature, but want to make sure we roll it out smoothly to our patients and don't frustrate them in the process.

Glad to hear you are excited about the new Arrivals feature.

1. I believe there may have been some miscommunication on this point. Arrival messages will go out the specified time before the time of the appointment, much like a Reminder or Confirmation, whereas an Automated Thank-You is tied to the act of scheduling an appointment. Arrival messages have the "last minute reminder" functionality you are expecting.

2. The Arrival message will only be sent according to the rules you setup, for example, 3 hours before the appointment time. This setup would mean future appointments would be sent Arrival messages, but only when the appointment is 3 hours or less away. Arrivals do support "confirmed" status filtration, much like the other automated appointment messaging services, and some "confirmed" status are always blocked from sending both the original Arrival message and the automated response (Arrived, In Treatment Room, Done).

3. Correct, if the child's wireless number in the system is actually the parent's wireless number, and the child sends 'A' from a different number that is not in the system, the automated Arrival response message will not sent, nor will the appointment be automatically marked as 'Arrived'. This is due to the fact this unknown number, since it's not in the system, cannot be automatically associated to a patient. If, however, the parent were to notify the office ahead of time that the child will be texting via a different number, the office could enter that wireless number under the child ahead of time and the system could associate the number to the child, find she has an appointment today that has been sent an Arrival message, and be able to automatically mark the appointment 'Arrived' and send the automated Arrival response. For the Arrivals feature to be most effective, we do recommend Appointment Views setup to clearly display which appointments are in the Arrived 'confirmed' status, since this feature will automatically mark the patient Arrived. Then office staff will be prepared to execute the third step in the Arrivals process, right-clicking the appointment and selecting "Send Come-In Text", which will populate the "Come In" message template setup in the Arrival rule into a text message window.

4. Correct, the automated responses are designed to work in conjunction with having sent the original Arrival message. If setup as described in #1/2, this shouldn't be an issue as patients who consented to receiving text messages will have been sent the original Arrival message.

Hopefully these answers clarify the Arrivals feature for your, and will help you to use it as effectively as possible for your office and ease of patient communication.

Thank you, Andrew!

The OpenDental manual says that the "send time" specifies how many days or hours after the appointment is created that the arrival message will be sent; there is also a box to block sending the arrival message within a certain number of days or hours of the appointment time. Is the manual incorrect, then? How are these Send Time rules meant to be applied?

I've sent a request to update the manual, as the documentation you mentioned is incorrect. Thank you for bringing this to our attention. The "Do not send within ___ appointment" setting functions the same as eReminders. For example, if the Send Time is 4 hours, Do Not Send Within is 2 hours, and an appointment is created at 9am scheduled for for 12pm, then an Arrival message will send. If an appointment is created at 11am scheduled for 12pm, the Arrival message will not send.

Excellent - I just tested it and it worked wonderfully! Thank you for the clarification!

We will also shortly be adding an alert that will post when the patient has texted 'A' to indicate they have arrived. This will make it easier on office staff, rather than simply expecting them to notice an appointment is now 'Arrived'.

FYI - it's been working great for us so far today! Only thing we're wishing for is that there was a field to inserts the patient's preferred name rather than legal first name into the messaging.

That's great to hear that the New Arrivals feature is working well for you. Your desire to include preferred names would fall into the feature request category. Fortunately there is already a feature request that would cover this. Search for Feature Request number 5565.

https://opendental.com/manual/featurerequests.html