The Online Appointments tab show a list of past and future appointments booked via booked online. You will need to have Online Booking enabled and your user must have the security permissions to access this tab before it becomes available.

More information on how to add tabs onto the appointment book can be found here - Adding Activity Tabs to the Appointment Book

The Online Appointments tab will display all appointment From the date selected at the bottom.

Appointments can be ticked as actioned by ticking the check box on the left hand column. To show actioned appointments click the show actioned box

Appointment Type

New: New Patient (not registered at the Practice) requesting an appointment.
Planned treatment: Treatment has been planned by a clinician.
Existing: A registered patient making an unplanned appointment.
Recall: Patient using the recall link

Optionally filter by choosing one of the Show options and the From date.

The list will always sort by date and time

Appointment Notes

If any notes were added during the booking stage a yellow note symbol will display. You may need to take note of this or do something before the appointment commences.

Click the Notes icon to display the notes that the patient entered when making the appointment on the portal.

Potential Duplicate Record

The EXACT software has a mechanism for defining the minimum mandatory patient fields that must be recorded for a patient record.

EXACT ignores this setting when creating a New patient from an online booking.

Existing Patients recording new information

What happens when existing patients enter information that contradicts records (such as a changed Email address)?

The new details don't automatically overwrite current details, but are stored in the "Notes about this appointment" area, accessible when you Edit the appointment.

To avoid any duplications, the system checks for matches at the time the new record is created:

Matching First Name AND Last Name

and/or

Matching Date of birth

and/or

Matching Mobile number

and/or

Matching email address

If any of these conditions are met, the duplicate record warning displays in the Online Appointments Tab, and the matching records display in red text:

To locate and merge a possible duplicate record that has been indicated

1. Highlight / select the patient in the Online Appointments Tab:

   You will see the Duplicates button become available

2. Click the Duplicates button or click the Possible Duplicate Record icon to display the Duplicate Patients dialogue

   The top portion of the screen displays the new patient details and the bottom portion of the screen displays the existing records that could possibly be the same patient.

   Specific fields in the existing record that match the new record display in red text.

3. Decide - is this a duplicate or a New patient?

   (Optionally click the View Patient button to view the patient file).

4. If this is not the same patient, click the Continue button to return to the Possible Duplicates window.
5. If this is the same patient, click the Merge button to display the Merge Patient Details:
6. To merge the existing patient and the new online bookings patient, click the OK button.

   You will see a request for confirmation, with a warning that the operation is irreversible:

   Selecting Yes causes the following system to do the following:

   1. Merge the two records.
   2. Associate the appointment to the existing patient record and retain it in the appointment tab.
   3. Erase the now redundant new record.
   4. Add a pop up NOTE to the destination Patient.
      
      This note includes any details which could not be successfully merge into the Patients file, so that the user can make an informed decision and enter these extra details if they are applicable.
      
      

    

7. Use the pop up note guideline and check that the two records have merged successfully.

   NOTE ON MANUALLY MERGING TWO PATIENTS:
   When EXACT merges an online booking Patient with an existing Patient record, the new record is automatically deleted.
   However, if a practitioner manually merges two patients by means of the Merge button in the Patients File, the source patient file is NOT deleted, so in this case the practitioner needs to manually mark the source patient file as ‘Inactive’.

The following details are merged

• First name
• Second name
• Last name
• Prefix (Holland only)
• Title
• Also known as (Holland only - creates it if it is not present)
• Initials
• Sex
• Date of birth
• Home address and post code
• Work address and post code
• Home, mobile, and work phone and work phone contact
• Alternative phone number and contact
• Fax number, pager number
• Email addresses

Patient records:

• Patient x-rays and video
• Contacts
• Patient notes and dated notes
• Charting
• Appointments
• Perio WHO and BPE (not sure if this includes new Holland perio)
• Transactions and associated invoice lines
• Waitlist entries
• Denplan OHS
• Pathology
• Medical History (just integrated medical history only?)
• Prescriptions
• Recalls
• Smile Surveys
• NHS Pilot Information
• Examine-Pro
• 3rd party link records (but not the actual third party data, which isn't held in our database)
• Custom tabs

CALL ME indicator

CALL ME indicator: If the patient has indicated that they want a call back the row appears in Red and the word CALL ME displays next to the patient name.

Contacting the patient via the Online Booking Tab

You can contact patients from this tab by choosing the icon.

For example you can select the email icon to email

Telephone status indicators. These are customisable status indicators that will vary across Practices. Initially they are grey, but they can be clicked to change colour and thereby indicate status.