Introduction:
Denticon offers a variety of data tags for use in templates when emailing or texting patients either directly or via automated campaigns. However, some data tags are only available for use in Automated Campaigns and will not populate data when used to directly text a patient from the Message Hub.
Issue description:
When directly messaging patients via the Message Hub, appointment/date merge tags do not populate, those merge tags only populate when the messaging goes out through the Automated Campaign. This is because automated messaging touchpoints are based off of event triggers that are tied to patient's specific appointment date and time.
On demand messaging is not tied to any specific patient appointment so it won't be able to calculate the #APPT_DATETIME# effectively. For example, let's say a patient has an appointment on 8/5 and one on 8/6. For on demand messaging, the Message Hub does not know which appointment to use to populate the message. An automated campaign would send out messaging based on the touchpoint setup when calculating for 8/5 and 8/6 respectively. If the touchpoint is set out to go out one day before an appointment, the automated campaign would use the #APPT_DATETIME# to send out messages on 8/4 and 8/5 for all patients with appointments on 8/5 and 8/6.
Signs:
The body of the template will appear, but the space where the data tags are in the template will be blank:
Basic troubleshooting steps:
- Select patient that received the text with no appointment data and navigate to the Patient Overview screen.
- Click the patient's cell phone number to launch the Message Hub.
- Review the patient's SMS history to determine if the text came from on demand messaging or as part of an automated campaign.
- If a message was sent on demand, below the text message will show the user who sent it.
If a message was sent from an automated campaign, below the text message will show Automated Campaigns
Best Practices:
Our team has advised using the following merge tags in templates meant for on demand messaging:
You may want to make a separate template for on demand use that the uses Next Scheduled Appointment Date, and one template for campaign use that uses #APPT_DATETIME#. To make it easier for staff to avoid these templates, we suggest naming the campaigns you want to show quickly with a "1" at the beginning and those not to use for on-demand messages with a "z" or "Campaign" prefix. We have implemented this naming convention for all new PGIDs, but historical ones could not be updated.
Contact support:
Contact support if you have verified that the message originated from an automated campaign, checked the template setup to confirm the correct data tags have been used, and the data tags are still not populating.