How do others cancel whole day list of patients that later need rescheduling?

This seems to be the only way currently. But if you someone from Dentally could clarify this would help… 

If other practices can comment here that would be appreciated as I am interested in knowing more about how other practices do this as part of best practice.

When viewing the calendar, I change view to List View, I hide all the calendars and view only the dentist that needs their day cancelling, then I click the button with the 3 lines to open appointment options and click Bulk edit appointments… then at the top left of the screen I select all appointments that need cancelling and click Edit.

Then firstly I click Contact Patients by SMS message because they are more likely to see this type of correspondence, i select a template that we have made, it reads “[patient_title] [patient_last_name]. We need to cancel your appointment on [appointment_time]. Please call 02392545000 to re-book. - Smile Dental Care Gosport”

This SMS has the correct data tags which means that if you send this it will input the correct appointment time for that patient for that appointment that needs cancelling, once i create SMS it will tell me if any SMS’s have failed and then i contact these patients in a different way, sometimes they only have a landline sometimes i can only send an Email, usually everyone has a Mobile to text.

Then after messaging i Update Appointment Status to cancelled and set cancellation reason which you can also customise, then make sure to click save cancellations, don’t click finished until you have clicked save cancellation.

As a result i can cancel a clinicians day who has sometimes 20-30 appointments within 2 minutes.

Important to note that you should always phone the first few patients or the whole morning if cancelling on the same day in case they are already on the way or for courtesy.

Hope this helps you and anyone in the future!