How do you handle broken appointments in OD?

[brentwood]

What I am doing is mark it as broken appointment and send it to unscheduled list. By marking it as broken, I got the chance to enter an entry in account module. By sending it to unscheduled list, I know I need to reschedule this patient sometime in the future.

But I really like to leave the borken appointments on appointment module such that I can see clearly who broke the appointments on that day. is there a way to cover all the things I want, .i.e. have the appointments on appointment module and unscheduled list?

[sparkly]

that's the recommended way to do it. per OD preferences, those broken appts you leave on the schedule will only serve to clutter it, so why would you want to keep them there (since you already have a record of it in the account module and in the appt lookup for the patient.)

i, like you, like to see it on the schedule as a visual block. you could make a task called Broken Appts. after you do the first half of your steps, you can make a task entry linked to the patient and put that task into the schedule like a bookmark that the patient did have an appointment. more work but it shows. don;t know how well reporting would work if you ever wanted to see all these 'tasks' of broken appts.

i personally just detach the procedures linked to the appt, write in the procedure (crown #14) in the notes, then break the appt and make account entries. this frees up the procedures to be attached to a new appt when the patient reschedules. with this though, you don't get to send the procedures+appt to the unscheduled list. i dont use the unscheduled list because if the person doesn't reschedule right there, they usually take their time calling back at which point I take it from the planned appts list. we use that one for calling patients since the unscheduled should be for short-term to-do lists.

[brentwood]

Thanks for sharing. I guess I need to start using planned appointments.

[atd]

you could make a task called Broken Appts. after you do the first half of your steps, you can make a task entry linked to the patient and put that task into the schedule like a bookmark that the patient did have an appointment

Can you explain how you put a task into the appointment schedule?

I agree that visually being able to look back at a day and see how many appointments were broken is useful.

[jordansparks]

I'm not quite sure what they meant. Tasks won't show in the Appt module. Yes, retaining broken appointments is a planned enhancement. It would actually be more of an automated version of making a copy of the appointment without any procedures attached.

[Jorgebon]

In our office we make a note for the patient that says "Patient missed appt" and after we remove the appointment from the schedule, we place the patient note where the appointment was. That way you'll have a yellow box anywhere in the schedule where a patient missed an appointment. This is an easy way to see how many patients have missed appointments during the week, since the color is easy to spot. It would be great if this note were automatically generated when you delete a broken appointment or send it to the unscheduled list.
Jorge Bonilla, DMD

[drtech]

We do the same thing for major appts. I agree, it would be great to automatically make a note where a broken appt was (sort of, but you might get cluttered with notes if there were too many in a day...)

[CMJ]

I came up with a solution for broken appointments. I mark the appointment as a broken appointment. I either send it to unscheduled list or delete it (depends on the patient) If a NP I just mark it broken appt and leave it on the schedule.
The next thing I do is I have block out (Cancelled/FA appt) set up every day at the end of the day with each appt we mark as CA/FA I add it to the block out. This way we can see at a glance why our schedules have holes in it or who cancelled on a given day.

[DavidWolf]

I have an operatory column in my schedule named Cancelled. If somone no shows or cancels we break the appointement to note it in the account and then move the appointment to the dummy column. This way we can see the appointment which was cancelled on the schedule but the active column stays clear for regular scheduling use, ie to be able to fill the appointments which are cancelled in advance on the same day. By the end of the day our front desk has the task of following up with the cancelled/ missed appointments to get them rescheduled. If any are left by the end of the day I know that they did not get rescheduled; at that point we decide to either delete or send to unscheduled. However, I just recently learned that we should probably be deleting them rather than sending them to unscheduled because we use the planned appointment list to re-schedule the appointment if we do it on a later date.

We use the planned appointments for all our treatment plans, we have also been using the unscheduled list pretty much for all appointments that get cancelled or no shows but don't get rescheduled the same day. We have run into a glitch where appointments that are planned, scheduled and then sent to unscheduled stay in the planned appointment list but when we try to reschedule them (the unscheduled appointments) from the planned appointment list we get an error message about the treatment already being attached to a different appointment. The planned appointment doesn't know that it is the same appointment on the unscheduled list.

This doesn't happen that often because we try to get all appointments rescheduled before they can make it to the unscheduled list?
But there definitely is a conflict in Open Dental because the unscheduled list and the planned appointment list do not get along very well with each other. My thought is we should be using one or the other until OD is smart enough to handle using both planned and unscheduled at the same time.