Sorting Appointment Notifications using Outlook Rules
- Cory Hoover
Depending on the number of providers and your daily volume, it may be practical to enable rules in your Outlook application to sort or otherwise process the notifications from NextPatient.
By default, NextPatient can apply a different Send-To address on a per provider, per location basis as needed within our admin panel, so this scenario will default to using rules to sort mail by Visit Reason.
For Microsoft Outlook OWA:
Open your account by going to either https://outlook.office.com or https://www.outlook.com
Click on the gear cog on the top-right corner to access the settings panel and type “Inbox Rules”; select this option which it appears on the list
Click on Add new rule and give it name such as “NP-New Patient Rule”
Under Add a condition, select “Message body includes” under the Keywords section. Enter the EXACT phrase that appears in the existing notification email from NextPatient. In this case, I will use “reason: New Patient”. Notice that in the image below, the full reason includes “: Acne”, but as long as the section I use is one continuous piece, I can leave off the ending if needed.
Click on Add another condition and select “From” under the People section. Enter the following email address: “appointments@nextpatient.co”.
Under Add an Action, select the appropriate option. This might be to mark it with importance, categorize the message, move it to a dedicated folder, or redirect it to another user on your team.
Make sure that the Stop processing more rules option remains checked! When finished, it may look something like this:
If you need to run additional rules on the other notifications from NP, they will be applied in the order seen on the main Rules screen and you can arrange the order. This allows you to have a rule that might have an action to delete remaining messages at the end of the priority list. To sort the rules, use the arrows indicated in the red box in the image below.
Using these samples, you can create rules to create different workflows for cancellation notifications and different message per doctor or per visit reason as needed.