When Cliniko sends automated appointment reminders and confirmation emails, you'll want them to have unique information about each appointment! The same holds true for letters—although letters are based from unique letter templates, they'll need to be customised for each patient! Doing these customisations one at a time, though, and editing each reminder or each confirmation email before it goes out would be insanely time consuming—and not really worth the effort!

That's where placeholders come in! We'll cover:

Placeholders "pull" information into specific fields. They show up in various templates in Cliniko as highlighted text. For example, a confirmation email template might look something like this:

You'll see that things like Patient.FirstName and Appointment.Date are highlighted. This looks a bit funny, but don't worry—your patients won't see these! We'll explain below.

As mentioned, placeholders "pull" information into an email, SMS reminder, or letter. Cliniko is pretty smart, and it knows that what's in the highlighted text (such as Patient.FirstName) should be replaced with actual information! So, while your template will display the placeholders, the actual message that the patient sees will include all the details that make sense to them (and you!):

You'll find placeholders in three places in Cliniko:

Overall, placeholders are a really powerful little feature of Cliniko that should help to reduce your workload of manually entering certain types of information over and over again, when it comes to communicating with your patients!