Notifications: Appointments not being Confirmed and other Troubleshooting

Notifications: Appointments not being Confirmed and other Troubleshooting

If appointments are being confirmed it means that you subscribe to Kapow's Virtual Mobile Number and can therefore send and receive text messages - this is what allows the appointment status updates. If they fail there are some steps you can take to trouble-shoot the issue. If these fail please email support and provide screenshots of the functions below in that email.

Please note that if an appointment is created and a notification sent, then the appointment is moved, it will not send another confirmation, that will have to be managed by manually confirming the appointment.

Firstly, log into the Kapow account to confirm your settings. Do you have enough credits?

If you do, in Aurora do the following troubleshooting
Check the Patient Notifications Inquiry in Reports & Inquiries>Marketing for the required date range to see if any responses were Sent and Received on that day:


First, check the one patient.

Then, check another few Patients who responded on that same day to see if  the status on their appointment was updated to Confirmed.
  1. If not, re-type the password in Config>Patient>Notifications.
  2. If other patients are fine it must be limited to one Patient or Appointment.
In Configure System Settings in Patient>Notifications, check the allowed responses. Only exactly-matching responses from a client will update the appointment status. Ask them to tell you what they responded with exactly.


Next,  compare the Config the System Notification Defaults is set to SMS. If SMS is ticked, the Patient setting should match. If it is unticked, in the Patient "SMS" should be ticked in Patient>Marketing record (PS be careful in Config - if you "click" into the password field, you will have to re-enter the password).


Check the Appointment Specialist in Config>Scheduler and expand the record to ensure that they are set to allow Notifications.


Check the Appointment Reasons for the reasons to ensure that Notifications are allowed for the Reason on the appointment:


Check the Patient file to ensure that there is a mobile # in the Mobile # field OR in the Preferred Contact mobile field if applicable. If the mobile # is in the home # field it won't work.
Also try this: Go back to the Patient Notifications Inquiry in Reports & Inquiries and double click on the Response ID. If you get a message like this, it means that the specialist was changed in some way:


Open the Primary appointment, then click on the icon beside the now-specialist name, and find the primary appointment specialist. 


Ask the end user who reported the problem to monitor the failure to update the status to see if they are ALWAYS appointments where there has been a change to the Specialist?  

Lastly, have there been any outages for your network supplier for that period? Phones down for example?

It is possible to run a test.  Put your phone # in a test patient, make an appointment for 1/2 or an hour before the scheduled task is run eg if frequency is 1 day before, make appointment for tomorrow but in 1/2-1 hour's time to give the task time to queue. If the frequency is 2 days earlier, make the appointment for 2 days time 1/2-1 hour from now...