Appointment reminders

Reminders are fixed cards under Settings → Automations → Reminders. Each card is one message anchored to the appointment itself, so a reschedule recalculates any delivery that is still pending and a cancellation stops pending delivery.

Each reminder reads as a sentence — "Send SMS 24 hours before the appointment" — followed by the template it sends. Click the template name to edit it. Automated SMS and WhatsApp reminders respect the practice send window; a reminder that comes due overnight goes out when the window opens.

Reminders that talk about an appointment still to come — the pre-visit reminder, the booking confirmation and the appointment-moved card — are not sent once that appointment has started. A confirmation arriving after the visit tells the patient something untrue, so a reminder delayed past the appointment is marked as not sent rather than delivered late. The post-visit follow-up is unaffected by the clock: it describes something that has already happened. The missed-appointment follow-up and the cancellation message now also require the appointment to still be in the state they describe — if a no-show is corrected to attended, or a cancellation is undone, before the message goes out, it is not sent. An appointment-moved message also requires the appointment to remain both upcoming and non-terminal.

Add and remove reminders

Add on a card creates another reminder of that kind, and the bin icon on a row deletes one. Pre-visit and post-visit cards can hold several reminders — two pre-visit reminders (48 hours by email, 24 hours by SMS) is the usual setup. The event-driven cards hold one each, because a second would mean two messages for the same event.

One practice can keep at most 100 reminder rules switched on at once. The page shows the active count. At the limit, switch off an existing rule or save the new rule switched off; archived and switched-off rules do not consume the active allowance.

Timing takes minutes, hours or days, and shows whichever unit represents the stored value exactly — a reminder set to 90 minutes reads as 90 minutes, not as an hour and a half rounded off. Timings save when you leave the box.

The event-driven cards — appointment moved, missed appointment, cancellation — send as soon as the event happens. Use Add a delay on the row if you would rather wait first, for example to give a no-show an hour before you chase them. Setting the delay back to 0 returns them to sending immediately.

Card edits apply when new reminder records are created. A reminder already scheduled keeps the rule timing, channel and template content captured at the time it was scheduled. Switching a card off cancels deliveries that have not started.

Deleting a reminder archives the rule and cancels only deliveries that have not started. Existing send-history and idempotency records are retained, so an old delivery remains auditable and cannot be recreated by deleting its rule.

SmileLine does not retry a technically broken reminder forever. After ten consecutive processing failures, that reminder delivery is skipped and the patient timeline records that it needs staff review. Other reminders keep their own independent delivery state.

There is a matching limit on rescheduling. An appointment whose time keeps changing — usually one being edited repeatedly in a connected practice management system — re-arms its reminders up to twenty times. After that the reminder stops following the appointment, and the patient timeline records that it needs staff review.

Reschedules and cancellations

Reminders follow the appointment record:

• Rescheduled — reminders recompute against the new time. This includes a reminder whose send time had already passed: booking an appointment for tomorrow does not permanently lose its 48-hour reminder, and moving that appointment further out arms it again. A reminder that genuinely reached the patient stays in the history and is not sent again; one that never made it out to a provider is re-armed for the new time. The Appointment moved card, if enabled, tells the patient the new time — every time the appointment moves, not just the first.
• Moved into the past — a reminder recomputed against a time that has already passed is not sent. Recompute follows the live appointment, so the check is made against the new time rather than the one the reminder was written for.
• Cancelled — pending reminders are cancelled and the cancellation message (if enabled) goes out.
• No-show — remaining reminders are cancelled and the missed-appointment follow-up goes out.
• PMS correction waiting — if the PMS contradicts a backwards or terminal appointment fact, a reminder that comes due stops at the final provider boundary and is marked as not sent until an appointment editor resolves the correction. Keeping SmileLine's fact re-arms every interrupted reminder that is still relevant. Accepting the PMS fact recomputes time-anchored reminders, but does not create a retrospective booking, move, cancellation or no-show announcement.

A live PMS update that resolves the contradiction follows the same relevance rules. A historical backfill is different: importing history never sends a patient message. It records the interrupted occurrence as Not sent — historical PMS reconciliation, while leaving the reminder eligible for a later live reschedule. That old message cannot be retried from the Inbox; a future live change creates a fresh occurrence with current appointment content.

Practice management systems

Appointments that arrive from the PMS get the same reminders as ones booked in SmileLine — the cards make no distinction once they're enabled.

See PMS integrations for the correction review workflow. A reminder stopped by that review remains recoverable. If it is still relevant, resolving the correction re-arms it with a new delivery generation. If it has become irrelevant while staff review the correction, the failed ledger remains eligible for a later appointment reschedule instead of being made permanently terminal.