Time Ask To Arrive

[mfdental]

Hello,
I was wondering if there was a way to make the "Time Ask To Arrive" to show up in the "View Pat Appts" box? We frequently use the "time ask to arrive" box for habitual late patients and love the function. However, it only shows up on the schedule screen, or if you actually double click on the appointment. Sometimes when patients call to check on their appointment times, my staff would click on the "View Pat Appts" box, and tell them the time that's listed on that box, but that is the actual appointment time, and not the "time ask to arrive" time. Therefore, patients get upset, because we tell them the "time asked to arrive" when we made the appointment, but then we tell them the actual appointment time when they call to ask.

I know I can train my staff to just always double click on the appointment to double check, but it becomes a hassle when they are trying to verify a family full of appointments, or multiple appointments for one patient.

[JoeMontano]

Greetings,

Currently from what I can see you can not directly add the "Time Ask To Arrive" to this window.
Initially though I have two thoughts as to what could work for you and wouldn't require any code changes on our end (things you could do right now).
1) Have your staff enter the time asked to arrive in the "Note" field instead of the "Time Ask To Arrive" field in the appointment edit window.
2) Submit a feature request
*This could be a feature to allow the window to use changable display fields so that you can show and hide info based off of your preference.
*Or this could be as simple as adding in the specific "Time Ask To Arrive" column to the code.

Either way I will look into this for you and get back with what feedback I get from the other engineers.

[JoeMontano]

Well after talking the the other engineers here it appears that the two options that I presented are your best bet.

[mfdental]

To be honest, is there any advantage for open dental to show the actual appointment time rather than the 'time ask to arrive' time in the "view pat appts" box? Actual appointment time is important when filling the schedule, but that is not done through the "view pat appt" box. The purpose of the "view pat appt" box is basically to get an overview of all scheduled appointments for a patient.

So no advantages... but many disadvantages: increased chance for staff to accidentally give wrong time to patient... makes us look bad for flip-flopping on appointment times... adds extra work for staff to have to manually double click on each appointment just to double check if the 'time ask to arrive' box is filled in or not. Your first option is a nice idea, but its not practical, and also no staff is perfect. I guarantee that there will be a few times a week where the front desk forgets to put in the 'time ask to arrive' in the appointment note, and then we end up with inconsistent appointment times and upset patients again.

What's funny is you guys have the right idea in the "confirmation list" window, it does in fact show the "time ask to arrive time"...

I put in a request to just completely replace the time to 'time ask to arrive' in the 'view appt box', in a similar fashion to how you guys did it for the 'confirmation list' window. Of course, if 'time ask to arrive' is left blank, it should default to the actual time. Hopefully people will agree with me and support this change.