This is Why Pulling Your Appointment Schedule Every 4 Hours Is Ideal
We’re often asked:
“Wouldn’t it be better if you checked our appointment schedule every hour, or even every minute?”
Short answer:
Pulling your schedule more often makes virtually no difference to the accuracy of the services DoctorConnect provides.
Want to know more? Here is a more detailed explanation
By pulling your appointment information several times a day, we ensure we’re always working with your most up-to-date schedule well before any reminders are sent.
The primary reason we pull every 4 hours isn’t about accuracy—instead, it’s about building robustness and redundancy into our system for extra peace of mind. This way, if there’s ever a missed update or your clinic needs to send a last-minute bulk message to patients (such as a same-day office closure or urgent notice), we have the most current information on your recently entered appointments.
We’ve used this approach successfully for thousands of clinics over more than 15 years—you can trust that it works.
In fact, even if we only pulled your schedule once at the end of each day, your reminders for the following day would still be accurate and up to date.
Reminders always use your latest schedule.
- Whenever we prepare a reminder to go out—say, one day before an appointment—it’s built using the most recent information available at that moment.
- Important detail: At the start of each business day, reminders scheduled to go out that day for future appointments won’t be changed, regardless of your pull frequency.
- For example: If you had a reminder set to go out today for an appointment tomorrow, but you change the appointment time today, the reminder that doctorconnect sends today won’t reflect the new time you just updated in your EHR or practice management system – it is almost certain that today’s messages have been handed off to our vendors for delivery.
- However, any reminders scheduled for tomorrow or later will always reflect all changes made up until the end of today. So you’re covered and your patients will be advised of any changes you made today.
Pulling more frequently does not increase accuracy.
- As long as we receive all your schedule updates by the end of each day, that’s more than enough time to update all reminders set to go out tomorrow or later.
- Increasing how often we pull your schedule (hourly, every 10 minutes, etc.) will not make your reminders more accurate.
- The only way a reminder could ever go out with “old” information is if a change is made the same day that the reminder was set to go out—and pulling more frequently simply doesn’t help with that.
- Bottom line: Changes you make in your system today, that would require a reminder going out today, won’t be reflected in that reminder—no matter how often we check for updates. But everything for tomorrow and beyond will always be correct. This method is tried and tested with tens of thousands of providers for over a decade.
What about your other services?
It’s important to note that increasing the pull frequency would not improve accuracy for any of our other services, either. This includes surveys, recare (recall) reminders, patient forms, and more. All of these services are designed to work with the latest data available at the time they’re processed, so checking for updates more often won’t make any difference in how accurate or up-to-date your communications are.
Our process ensures your patients always get the right message, at the right time—no matter which DoctorConnect service you’re using.
Are there exceptions?
There are always exceptions – for example, clients that heavily use our Compass scheduling tool may need tighter integration if they find that many of the slots being requested by on-line patients are already filled before the patient requests them. If you think you may have an exception – we of course welcome the opportunity to discuss this with you and finding the optimum solution.
Have a Unique Situation? Let’s Talk!
If you believe your business has a special case that might require more frequent schedule updates, please reach out to your account manager. We’re always happy to discuss your unique needs and explore solutions together. Just keep in mind that, in nearly all cases, increasing the pull frequency will not improve reminder accuracy—but we’re here to listen and help however we can!
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