An appointment will go through several status from "Pending" to "Completed".

The current status of the appointment is shown in the top right-hand corner of its entry in the calendar and next to its entry wherever you view the appointment history for a patient. You can cycle through these statuses by clicking on the current status, although they can also be set automatically in some instances.

They work as follows:

Pending: The appointment has been booked, but the patient has not confirmed they will be attending yet.

Confirmed: The patient has confirmed they will be attending this appointment. You can do this manually, or if the practice uses SMS confirmations, the patient can respond to their SMS confirmation with ‘YES’ and it will be confirmed automatically.

Arrived: Once the patient arrives in the practice, they should be marked as such by cycling the appointment status to the next stage. This will notify the appropriate practitioner that the patient has arrived and start a timer to keep track of when the patient arrived and how long they have waited.

In Surgery: You can change this manually or it will be automatically marked when the Practitioner opens the patient details in surgery.

Completed: This appointment has been completed and the patient left the practice. This can either be marked manually, or if the patient has been marked as being in surgery, Dentally will automatically complete the appointment at the end of the day if the patient was marked as having arrived in surgery, but it is good practice to do this from the desk as the patient leaves.

Once a patient has been marked as having arrived in the practice, they will be appear in the Waiting Room. A notification will pop up on the appropriate practitioner’s screen and the Waiting Room icon will show the number of patients waiting.

Patients are colour coded by Payment Plan. Any patients waiting for the Practitioner logged in will show in bold lettering.

When you are ready to deal with the patient, simply select them from the waiting list.