If you see patients who live outside of your clinic's local time zone, it's important that they receive confirmation emails and reminders that show the appointment's correct time!
There are going to be two things you need to do to ensure this happens:
Add "time zone" placeholders into your appointment reminder and confirmation templates.
Head over here to learn how to add the correct time zone to your patient. Below, we'll outline how to get your templates set up so that messages display the correct time to your patients!
Send appointments in your patients' time zones
🚨 It's very important that the time zone is set up in the patient's details page in order for this to work. Otherwise, even with the placeholders being used, the incorrect time (your clinic's time) will be listed in the appointment communications.
Head to Settings, and then Appointment confirmations and/or Appointment reminders:
You'll need to update each template separately, so if you have reminders and confirmations that go out to patients in different time zones, be sure to edit each template!
Select the template you want to edit:
On the next page, you'll be looking for the APPOINTMENT drop-down:
Within that drop-down, you'll see options that end with WithZone:
These are the placeholders that you'll want to include in your templates. So, for example, if you want the patient to see what time their appointment starts in their local time zone, select the StartTimeWithZone placeholder. That would then look like this in the template:
You'll want to be sure to delete the original placeholder, and replace it with the new one.
This placeholder will most likely increase the character count in SMS reminders, which could bump those up to 2 or more credits per message.
What that will do is ensure that the patient's time zone is listed in the message (i.e. AEST, as in the example below):
The above is just an example, and is meant to be indicative of how the time zone itself (i.e. AEST) will display. Messages that are sent to your patients will include their time zone (i.e. AWST).
The message, when sent to your patient, will show the time in their time zone:
The appointment will still show up in your Cliniko account as your time zone! If you look at the example above, you can see the appointment details at the top are two hours later than the time the patient sees. This is because the account in this example is set to AEST, but the patient's time zone is set to AWST (two hours behind).
For more information on time zone management, head over here.