This guide will help you enable Family Messaging in your Practice Management System (PMS) and explain how it integrates with your PMS.
What is Family Messaging?
Family Messaging allows a designated Guarantor or Responsible Party to receive all appointment reminders via email and SMS for their entire family account.
Steps to Enable Family Messaging
Navigate to the Appointment Reminders Campaign:
Go to the Special Settings section.
Select Enable Family Messaging.
Configuring Family Messaging in Your PMS
Eaglesoft:
Open the patient’s profile by selecting Edit Patient.
Choose the Responsible Party for each family member.
Enter the Responsible Party ID in the Resp. Party box.
Dentrix:
Select the patient.
Go to Edit and choose Set Head-of-House.
A pop-up will appear; select the Head of House from the family members listed.
Open Dental:
Go to the Family File.
Select the patient (e.g., John Smith).
Choose Set Guarantor.
How Messages Write Back to Your PMS
Outgoing Messages: These will be recorded under the person who received the message.
Incoming Messages: If the incoming phone number is associated with multiple patients, the message will not be written back to the system because it cannot identify the specific patient.
Customizing Write-Back Settings
Go to Patient Overview > Details > Appointment Reminder Customization.
If there are three or more family members involved in family messaging, you can change the individual to whom the messages will be written back.
By following these steps, you can ensure that appointment reminders are effectively communicated to the designated family members, streamlining your practice's communication process.
How to set your PMS to enable Family Messaging and how this writes back to your PMS.
From the Appointment Reminders Campaign, under Special Settings, you can select Enable Family Messaging. This will allow a valid Guarantor or Responsible Party to receive all email and SMS messages for the family account. Below, you will find the steps for setting this up within your PMS and how this writes back.
Eaglesoft
In Eaglesoft, you will select Edit Patient, and from here, you will choose the Responsible party for each family member. The responsible party ID will be entered in the box labeled Resp. Party, as shown below.
Dentrix
From Dentrix, you will select the patient. Once selected, you will go up to Edit and choose Set Head-of-House. A pop-up will appear to select the Head of House from the family members listed.
Open Dental
From Open Dental, you will find the Family File. Select the patient highlighted; as seen in the screenshot below, it is John Smith. Once selected, you will choose Set Guarantor.
Once these settings are set, it is important to note how these messages will write back to your PMS. Outgoing messages will write back to the person the message was sent to. For incoming messages, if the phone number the message is coming from is tied to multiple patients, the message will not be written back because we do not know which patient sent that message to the practice.
From the Patient Overview > Details > Appointment Reminder Customization, you can also change the individual in the family messaging to whom the message will write back. This will be an option if there are 3 or more family members in family messaging.