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 basic 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'. To enhance efficiency, the platform allows the status to shift to 'confirmed' or 'canceled' either through:

1. Manual updates by the practice staff, via the calendar;
2. By the patients, through the patient's app or email notifications;

Allowing Patient Confirmation

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

To do that, you must enter Practice Settings>Patient Scheduling and enable the toggle Allow Patient Confirmation.

You must then select the time limit within which the patient can confirm their appointment. In the example above, the patient can confirm their appointment up to six minutes before the scheduled time.

Allowing Patient Cancellation

Similarly, practices can also opt to let patients cancel their appointments independently, with the same timing rules of allowing the confirmation.

Cancellation Policy

The practice can choose to inform the patient of its cancellation policy. It will be displayed to the patient in the emails and patient's app.

To edit it, we must again enter Practice Settings>Patient Scheduling and locate the Cancelation Policy area. In it, you will find the Edit cancelation policy button.

You must then enter your cancellation policy and select Save.

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