Empowering Patients with Appointment Management in SigmaMD

SigmaMD’s Patient Appointment Management feature offers practices the ability to streamline their workflow and empower patients with greater control over their appointments. Understanding the system's default appointment statuses—booked, confirmed, and canceled—is essential for both clinicians and patients.

Default Appointment Statuses

Upon creation, every appointment in SigmaMD is initially set to 'booked'. This status can be manually updated at any time by the practice staff. To enhance efficiency, the platform allows the status to shift to 'confirmed' or 'canceled' either through manual updates by the practice staff or automatically by the patients, thanks to the Patient Appointment Management settings.

Allowing Patient Confirmation

Practices can choose to enable patients to confirm their appointments, providing two options for setting time limits on this action:

Minimum Advance Notice: Establish a timeframe within which patients are permitted to confirm their appointments—ranging from minutes to days before the scheduled time. For example, a practice may allow patients to confirm appointments up to 30 minutes before the event.
Until the Day Before: Patients can confirm their appointments up until a specified time on the day before the appointment. For instance, the system can be set to accept confirmations until 9:00 AM the day before the appointment. Reminder emails and in-app notifications will include a confirmation button to facilitate this process.

Allowing Patient Cancellation

Similarly, practices can also opt to let patients cancel their appointments independently, with the same timing rules of Minimum Advance Notice and Until the Day Before

By enabling these features, SigmaMD gives patients the flexibility to manage their healthcare proactively while providing practices with tools to automate appointment status updates, resulting in a more efficient scheduling system and higher patient satisfaction.