OceanMD will soon introduce a feature that allows patients to cancel their upcoming appointments via a Patient Reminder.
When a patient cancels an appointment via a Patient Reminder, Ocean will remove it from the provider’s schedule in the EMR. At the same time, Ocean will check whether that appointment is also associated with an eReferral for the patient. If so, it will be automatically removed from the eReferral as well.
This functionality will be available only to Ocean Sites that meet both of the following conditions:
- Their EMR is integrated with Ocean’s Patient Engagement products.
- Their Patient Reminders 'Appointment Source' setting is set to 'EMR Schedule'.
Ocean Sites using 'eReferral' as the Appointment Source for Patient Reminders will not have access to this appointment cancellation feature.
For Ocean Sites that have both an EMR integration for Patient Engagement and a FHIR API integration for eReferrals, Ocean will send a notify-update-service-request(s) FHIR message event when the appointment is cancelled and removed from the eReferral. The indication of cancellation in this event is an Appointment resource with:
- Appointment.status = "proposed"
- Appointment.start, Appointment.end, and Appointment.duration all left blank
Note: If the cancelled appointment is not associated with an eReferral, no FHIR message event will be sent.
This FHIR message event has always been sent out by Ocean for referral-based appointment cancellations, but it may become more prominent if this feature is enabled. We are notifying integrators to ensure that they are processing these messages to update the integrated systems internal eReferral record, maintaining synchronization with the status in Ocean and the EMR schedule.