Best Practice: Using Ocean Reminders
Patient Reminders are automated emails that are sent out to patients before their scheduled appointments. These automated emails allow you to notify patients of their upcoming appointments, as well as optionally securely send messages and eForms to patients.
When configuring your Ocean Reminders for appointments booked online, ensure that your booking window (how far in the future a patient can book an appointment online) aligns with your reminder window (when your reminders are being sent out to patients).
For example, Ocean Reminders can only go out at minimum one day in advance of the appointment. If you allow patients to book online for same day appointments, they will not receive your reminder email.
Advanced Feature: Using Booking and Post-Booking Forms
If you decide to queue forms for patients to complete using the booking form and post-booking form instead of Ocean Reminders, please note that this is an advanced feature of Ocean. This feature is only recommended for advanced Ocean eForm users. If you are interested in using this feature but are not familiar with Ocean eForms, we have a third party contractor who can assist with setting this up for your clinic. Contact us to learn more.
Ocean's online booking leverages the power of Ocean eForms at two points in time during the patients online booking experience. The first is a booking form and the second is a post-booking form.
The booking form is presented to the patient during Step 3- Details. It's recommended that this eForm is kept brief as we don't want to make it too difficult for patients to book their appointment.
The booking form contains three special items (item reference appointmentType, appointmentDuration and reasonForVisit). It's important that you do not edit these three item types. Ocean is hard coded to populate and pull information that is crucial to the online booking functionality from these fields.
To queue forms using the booking form during Step- 3 Details, use eForm Actions.
For example, if you would like to queue a form based on what appointment your patient has selected, you will need to use the following expression: appointmentType.r == "Follow up" where "Follow up" is the appointment type from your Appointment Type configuration.
The post-booking form is presented to the patient during Step 5- Confirmation.
To queue forms using the post-booking form during Step 5- Confirmation, you'll need to use a formula item type to gather the appointmentType response from the booking form from Step 3.
Caption: appointmentType: $$
Item Type: Formula
Item Reference: appointmentType
Show this field if: false
Formula: ScriptUtil.getResponse("form_ref", "appointmentType");
Where form_ref refers to the eform reference of your booking form.
From there, use eForm Actions to queue forms depending on what appointment type the patient selected in the booking form from Step 3.
Since the post-booking eForm is optional (patients can simply close the window without completing any eForms you have configured), Ocean Reminders can be a more reliable way of sending patients information and eForms prior to their appointment (see above).
Please note that if you ever change your booking form, you will need to edit the form_ref in your post booking form.