Tracking Recurring Appointments
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How are you tracking patients that have a recurring/repeat appointment set up? We are running into the problem of clients dropping off the schedule and then having their regular time already booked up because we missed that their recurring appointment had expired. We are a practice of 8 therapists, and I would estimate that about half of our clients are set up with recurring appointments.
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Hi Rogna, happy to help. On each client's Overview page, you can see at the top near their name how many recurring appointments are left in the client's scheduled appointment series. You'll also receive a Reminder in the Reminders section 30 days before a client's recurring appointment series ends. You can use these features to keep track of which client's appointment series are about to end to prevent double-booking.
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This is a huge problem. I became a simplepractice member in the fall of 2019 and I just had my first client "falling out of" my calendar, resulting in a regular longstanding client loosing their appointment time that week. It also caused me to open my closed practice to a new client, thinking I had a recurring spot available. I work long-term with lots of trauma clients and so years of therapy is not uncommon--to have to track whether they are close to their appt time expiring is ridiculous. It seems too, a big oversight when so many private practitioners are used to google or apple calendars for scheduling sessions--where a never ending recurrent appointment is in use. It's amazing to me that the SP calendar doesn't emulate that feature in those calendars, esp when insurance laws have changed and session limits for mental health coverage are (as far as I know) a rare thing. And YES, I will post this in the suggestions section that SP makes so hard to find!!!
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Am I the only one who is not getting reminders 30 days before the recurring appointments end?
I was excited to see this enhancement however I have never received a reminder and spend a lot of wasted time every week sifting through the calendar to see if anyone is getting close to running out.
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Hi Jon, if the client has any other future appointments, not associated with the recurring series, then this may explain why you're not getting a reminder that their appointment series is ending. To be sure, I'd recommend submitting an email Help Request our Customer Success Team to further investigate your account.
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I agree with this, PLEASE do something to change the future scheduled sessions so that we don't lose sight of having to keep track of clients that may "fall off the calendar" or simply create reminders that this will be ending for certain clients. This was a huge fiasco for my practice and I was completely unaware of this.
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Hi Danielle, good news! We recently introduced a Reminder that notifies clinicians when a client's recurring series is ending. It will be triggered 31 days before the last "Show" appointment in the recurring series. The Primary Clinician for the client and any Schedulers in the account will get this notification in their Reminders tab. If you want to cancel a recurring series for a client, this can also act as a great reminder to do so.
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Hi Marjorie, can you check to see if they were part of a recurring series, or if they were individually scheduled appointments? You can see this by clicking on the appointment in question, and seeing if the "Repeats" box is checked off. In this screenshot from my test account, you can see that the box isn't checked off: therefore, this is an individually scheduled appointment.
Also, the notification should show up in your Reminders tab 31 days before the last appointment in the series. It will disappear after the last day in the series, or if the recurring series was deleted altogether. You can check your Account Activity log to see if you, or a member of your team accidentally deleted a recurring series. If you need more help investigating your account, please reach out to our Customer Success Team by submitting an email Help Request.
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Hi Jon, this reminder should be working. We haven't identified any widespread issues with Reminders for recurring appointments coming to an end. If you're not getting notified 31 days before a recurring session ends in your Reminders tab, located on the left sidebar of your account, please reach out to our team so we can investigate your Reminders function. Click here to submit an email Help Request.
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Ruth,
Thank you for your response. I am confused, was under the influence there was a global issue with the alerts and there would need be corrected to a future enhancement. If this has been resolved, I am continuing to have problems. The below is the response I received from technical support in early December. Please advise If I should enter a new request.
Thanks,
JonOur technical team is still investigating the exact cause of why the reminders are not triggering. This will be something that will need to be adjusted within our platform after a thorough investigation to identify the cause of the expected behavior not populating within our platform. With consideration to these lengths, the platform enhancement will need to be prioritized accordingly in relation to the rest of our product enhancements and bandwidth of our Product/Engineering teams.
I can mark this request as solved for the time being and once the reminder enhancement has been resolved, I can reach back out to you in a new message. Rest assured that this investigation will be ongoing and will be resolved in a future enhancement once we've isolated and identified the issue -
Hi Jon, I apologize for the miscommunication. You're right, there are some customers who're still reporting issues with some of their Reminders. I've contacted our Engineering Team and they're working on a solution. I'll let you know when I hear more from them. Thank you for your patience as we work on resolving this issue once and for all!
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Hi Kristin, here's a feature request you can vote on for Indefinite Recurring Appointments. Our engineers are still working on a fix for the reminders notifying clinicians when an appointment series is about to end. We'll let you know once this feature is back up and running!
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I would really like to find out the most recent status of being notified of recurring appointments dropping off of a schedule. It's incredibly frustrating, and I have never received a reminder for a recurring appointment nearing its end. I just had a client drop off today that I thankfully noticed last night, but if I hadn't, it would've led to two clients showing up at the same time. I ended up comping a session due to the inconvenience of a needy client having to miss this week's appointment, but I don't want it to resort to this. It's very frustrating. Can you please update us on the status of this?
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Hi Jennifer, I've created a help request on your behalf so that our Technical Team can get back to you about the status of these Reminders. They'll reach out over email when they're back in the office on Monday. Thank you for your patience, we're sorry for the inconvenience this has caused you and your clients.
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