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My patient received an appointment reminder or confirmation with the wrong time zone. Help!
My patient received an appointment reminder or confirmation with the wrong time zone. Help!

Read this guide if your patient received a confirmation email with the incorrect time zone attached to their appointment.

Emily avatar
Written by Emily
Updated over a week ago

If your patient received a confirmation email that had the wrong time zone, it's likely going to be because:

Below, we'll walk you through how to check this!


Check the patient's time zone

The "time zone" placeholders in the confirmation template look at the time zone that's in the patient's details page—so, for instance, if the patient's time zone is set to AEST, the "time zone" placeholder will send appointment details in AEST. This is fine if the patient lives in the AEST time zone, but not too helpful if they're somewhere else!

To check what time zone they currently have, head to the patient's file, and look under the Time zone field:

If it says "Use account time zone", but this patient lives somewhere that doesn't have your account's time zone, you'll want to change this!

To do this, select the edit button, and scroll down a bit. Below the address field, you'll find an area called Time zone:

Use the drop-down menu to select the appropriate time zone. Save the settings, and your patient will now have the correct time zone:

Here's a quick video of the process:

All set! 🙌 This now means that this patient should receive appointment reminders and confirmations in their time zone, as long as you have your templates set up with the "time zone" placeholders. Head over here to learn how to do that.


The patient's email or calendar might be set to the wrong time zone

Another reason the confirmation or reminder email may show up incorrectly for the patient could be that the patient's own time zone settings (on their side) are incorrect. Generally, applications like Google Calendar or Apple Calendar update time zones automatically to sync with things like Daylight Savings or relocation (such as if someone is travelling), but sometimes, these apps can not get updated correctly.

If the time zone is incorrect on the patient's size, when the confirmation or reminder email is sent from Cliniko, the patient's email or calendar app might not "read" the appointment correctly and will try to convert it to the time it "thinks" it should be based on how their calendar or email is set up.

If everything looks correct to you on the Cliniko side of things, then we suggest asking the patient to check the time zone settings of their calendar and email application, which is the application recieiving the appointment from Cliniko. Each application will have their own settings to check, but we've shared some guides for commonly-usedc calendar apps. These guides may be subject to change, as they've been created by the companies who own the app, but they may be a good starting point.

Google Calendar

Apple/iPhone/iPad Calendar


Still having issues?

If you've checked the time zone settings of the patient and your account and can't quite determine what's going on, feel free to reach out to our support team. We're happy to help!

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