Appointment matching
What is "Matching"
"Matching" refers to the systematic procedure of accurately identifying a specific patient within your Practice Management System (PMS) to schedule an appointment with. It is a critical step that enables your team to familiarise themselves with the patient's medical history prior to their visit, thereby ensuring an informed and effective consultation.
How matching works
When PetsApp schedules an appointment in your PMS, it searches for the appropriate client and patient to link the appointment to in your calendar. Although this process usually operates seamlessly, there are instances where the data provided by the pet owner may not precisely align with the information stored in the PMS, resulting in difficulties in locating the correct client.
PetsApp employs multiple data points to enhance the accuracy of its matching process. These include:
- Patient ID
- Email address
- Phone number
- Patient name
When the system is not able to match your client we display a yellow "No match" pill next to the appointment.
A note on matching patient names
Ollie, Olly, Oli...
We have a system to match pets with their owners even if there are small differences in their names. For example, if a client enters their pet's name as "Ollie" but your Practice Management System has it as "Oli", PetsApp will still match them up correctly.
Improving matching
The best way to improve matching is to ensure the pet profile has the PMS patient ID attached to it. When sending an SMS to your clients via SMS Chat or a mass text invite we include a unique invite code that when accepted will populate their PetsApp profile with the pets along with the patient ID. This will ensure future appointments are correctly matched 🎉