Empowering providers with highly customized patient messaging is core to our mission. With our recent update, a new capability to customize messaging has become available. Welcome quiet periods.

With this new feature, you can customize the time of day during which you prefer to suppress appointment reminders going out to your patients. This is useful if you want to take extra care to avoid ringing and buzzing patients’ phones when it might be inappropriate. Don’t worry, meaningful defaults have always been applied to your account, but now you have the ability to change them for each reminder channel (email, phone and text) and even for each patient or caregiver.

The default quiet periods for new patients can be set in the Patients section of Settings:

This reflects the quiet periods we had observed previously. Now you can change them as appropriate for your patients.

If you need to change it for a particular patient, you can do so on the Patients tab. Just select the patient you need to customize quiet periods for and switch to the Contact Preferences tab of the patient details window that comes up. You will find the same three quiet period options there. Click Edit to change and don’t forget to save:

With the quiet periods now fully in your control, we allow you to also override them on a case by case basis. When you save an appointment, the confirmation dialog now has an option (enabled by default) to allow you to check if any of the reminders for this appointment will fall on the patient’s quiet period. Thus, we will inform you if any of the reminders violate the patient’s quiet period, but it is ultimately up to you if you want to adjust them or keep them as they are despite falling on the quiet period. After all, you are in control of the the quiet periods themselves, so you can make the change there as well — or simply disable the quiet period verification option when saving this particular appointment for a one-time override.