Appointment confirmation statuses in Open Dental, set so they mean something

Look at the confirmation colors on your schedule. Over time they drift. One status nobody uses. Two that mean the same thing. One that means something different to each person at the desk. The schedule still shows color, but it no longer tells you who is coming tomorrow. This post puts meaning back into those statuses and gives you a short routine that uses them.

How confirmation statuses work in Open Dental

Open Dental does not fix the statuses for you. Your practice defines them in the Appt Confirmed definitions, and the first status on the list is the default for every new appointment ¹. A status changes in one of three ways. Someone sets it by hand on the appointment, someone sets it from the Confirmation List, or it changes by itself when a reminder goes out or a patient replies to one ². Every change is saved in the audit trail, so you can see who changed what and when ².

The Confirmation List is the working view. It shows upcoming appointments filtered by status, so whoever confirms tomorrow’s schedule works from one screen instead of scrolling the appointment book ³. If your practice uses Open Dental’s eConfirmations, a paid eService, patients get automatic messages and can confirm by replying or tapping a link. The status updates without anyone touching it ⁴.

Keep the list short, and make each status an action

A status is useful only if it tells the next person what to do. Test each one with a single question. If I see this on tomorrow’s schedule at 4pm, do I know my next step? A short ladder usually covers it:

The first status in the list is the default for every new appointment ¹, so put “Not called” first. If “Confirmed” sits first, every new appointment starts out looking confirmed. Nobody notices until a chair sits empty.

Retire statuses nobody uses. Before you hide one, check whether any upcoming appointments still carry it, and move them to the right status first. Pick colors you can tell apart from across the room. Use the same color for the same status in every location.

A confirmation week routine

1. About a week out: the first reminder goes, automatic or by hand.
2. Two days out: filter the Confirmation List for anything not confirmed and work through it.
3. The day before: call whoever is still unconfirmed. A person calls, not a machine.
4. The day of: when a chair opens, look at the ASAP list first. It holds patients who asked to come in earlier ⁵.

The routine matters more than the exact days. Pick yours and write it into the front desk’s daily checklist. Give each step to one named person.

What the research says about reminders

Reminders help, and it matters little how you send them. A Cochrane review pooled seven randomized trials. Text message reminders raised attendance compared with no reminder (risk ratio 1.14). Text reminders and phone-call reminders did about equally well (risk ratio 0.99) ⁶. A 2016 meta-analysis of digital notifications found attendance of 67% with a notification against 54% without. More than one notification worked better than a single one ⁷. These studies cover health care in general, not only dentistry, and most are outside the US.

Two things follow. The phone call your team makes the day before is not outdated. In the trials it did as well as a text. And a series of reminders beats a single one, which is what a confirmation ladder gives you.

The day-before call, word for word

The day-before call works best when it is short, specific and the same every time. Write it down so a new team member sounds like everyone else:

1. Say who and why. “Hi, this is [Name] from [your practice], calling to confirm your visit with Dr. Reyes tomorrow at 10.”
2. Ask one question. “Will that still work for you?” Then stop talking.
3. If yes, set the status to Confirmed while you are still on the line, and mention anything the patient should bring.
4. If no, offer two specific new times before the call ends. A patient who hangs up without a new time is a candidate for the Unscheduled List.
5. If voicemail, leave the date, the time and the practice’s number. Set the status to Left message and try once more later in the day.

Say a patient cancels on the call and cannot rebook. Break the appointment instead of deleting it. Open Dental records the cancelled appointment and can send it to the Unscheduled List, where your weekly routine will find it again ⁸. You keep the history of the appointment and the reason it moved. You will want that when you review the month.

What a status should never mean

• “Probably coming.” A status records what happened, not what someone expects. If nobody reached the patient, the status says so.
• Two things at once. “Confirmed or left message” is a guess, not a status. Split it.
• Something only one person knows. If a status needs explaining at the morning huddle, rename it or retire it.

Review it once a month

Once a month, pull the appointments that were broken or missed. Look at the status each one had the day before. If most were already “Confirmed,” your confirmations are fine. Look at how far ahead you book, and at the Unscheduled List. If most were “Left message,” spend your time on the day-before call.

← All posts