If you want to make changes to a large group of patients' appointments, such as contacting a group of patients to tell them about having to rearrange their appointments or informing them of a change of practitioner, you can do this through the Bulk Editing feature.
Bulk editing of appointments is only available to users with a Level 4 permission setting, or lower level users who have been opted into this in their User Settings.
What can you do with Bulk Editing?
From the Calendar, you can select all patients who have appointments on a particular day or range of days and:
Change their appointment status (cancelled, etc.)
Contact the patients by SMS, Letter or email.
How to use Bulk Editing
Go to the Calendar
Select the day you wish to contact patients about or wish to edit
Select the Calendar View button and choose 'List View'
Remove the practitioner(s) who you do NOT want to make changes to so that you are left with ONLY the practitioners whose book you want to edit
Select the option button
Select Bulk Edit appointments...
Now that you have the Practitioners selected and are in Bulk Edit mode:
Select the appointments - either individually or all at once with the tick box at the top of the list
Tip - using the paintbrush icon, you can colour the appointments by practitioner, payment plan or appointment reason to help identify the appointments you wish to edit.
How to select more than one day at a time
If you need to select more than one day's worth of patients at one time, you select the appointments for one day.
You then use the date arrows (top left) to move through your calendar until you find the next appropriate date.
You then select the appointments as before. The number at the top of the list will keep a running count of how many appointments you have selected.
When you have selected all appointments, select the action you require.
Now you have the Appointments selected:
Once appointments are selected a new set of buttons appears. From these, select the action you wish to take with these appointments.
Remove from List
This simply unticks the patients you have selected.
Contact Patients
This allows you to select the method of contact and the appropriate template. You can add or edit templates from the Settings>Templates menu.
Patient contact failed
If a patient does not have your selected method of communication, i.e. they do not have email, or they do not have a mobile number in their details, they will not receive your communication.
Dentally lets you know that these patients have not been contacted using the method you selected.
Follow the steps above. If any patient communication fails, the patient's name is displayed on the screen. From here you can click on the patient and send them a message using their available communication method.
Update appointment Status
This allows you to mark all appointments as "Cancelled" or whatever you need to set the status to.
Perform More than one Action on the Selected appointments
If you want to perform more than one action on the selection, it is easy to do. For example, you might wish to cancel appointments, and then send out a SMS or email message to patients telling them what you have done.
Complete the first action.
Go back to the top of the screen.
Check the same number of appointments are selected.
Select the next action you wish to take.
Click on Finished when you have completed all actions
Finished
When you have selected all patients, and have completed all the appropriate actions, click on Finished and return your calendar view to Single Day or Multi Day.
Remove selections
To remove all the selections after using Bulk Editing, refresh your browser - using F5 or the refresh arrow in the browser.
If you start a new Bulk Editing session, and there appear to be a number of appointments already selected, use F5 or the refresh arrow to refresh Dentally.
Always ensure you start from 0 appointments selected.
Cancellation Reasons
You can assign cancellations reasons to a group of patients whose appointments you are cancelling in a group, or in bulk.
In The Calendar
Select List mode
Select More ...
Select Bulk Edit appointments...
Select the appointments you wish to cancel
Select Edit
Select Update Appointment Status to Cancelled
A new box appears. Set Cancellation Reason
Save Cancellations
Select Update Appointments
Select Finished, once the progress bar says complete