Summary
Cloud 9 Connect is a versatile patient communications service that offers two-way text messaging, automated appointment reminders via text and email, recurring campaigns, and patient communication options in the Scheduled Contract Payments Module. This article addresses common issues and offers solutions for diagnosing and troubleshooting Cloud 9 Connect. If you need further assistance, please contact Support. The document follows a Q&A format, with questions in bold and answers in regular text.
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Q: I cannot access or edit Appointment Campaigns located in Edit > Automation Suite > Appointment Campaigns, how can I fix this?
A: To enable an employee access to and ability to edit the Appointment Campaigns, office staff must select the correct permissions in Edit > Setup > Employees. Add the permission: Edit Reminders Setup. This requires an admin at the practice to configure. After applying the permission, the affected user should log out and back into Cloud 9 to proceed.
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Q: My staff member cannot access the Two Way Messaging within Cloud 9, how can I give them access?
A: To enable Two Way Messaging for employees, office staff with admin access must navigate to Edit > Setup > Employees and add the permission: Enable Two-Way Texting. After applying this permission, the affected user should log out and back into Cloud 9 to use the feature.
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Q: Why can't I access the templates tab in Edit > Automation Suite > Recurring Campaigns to create a new text message for C9 Connect Reminder or SCP Patient Communication Options Texts?
A: To enable employees to edit text and email templates in the 'Templates' tab under Edit > Automation Suite > Recurring Campaigns, office staff must select the appropriate permission in Edit > Setup > Employees. Admins should grant the "Recurring Campaigns: Edit Campaigns" permission. Once set, the user should log out and back into Cloud 9 to access the feature. For a more detailed breakdown of permissions please see this article: Recurring Campaigns Employee Permissions.
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Q: My patient/Responsible Party reports they are not receiving appointment reminders, how can I check this and fix the problem?
A: There are several routes you can explore to make sure your patients/responsible parties are receiving reminders. I will review each scenario and the order I would check to identify where the issue might be coming from.
I. The first place to check is within Edit > Patient > Relationships tab > Responsible party information. Click Edit on the responsible party and check that they have the correspondence boxes checked first. (Screenshot Below.)
II. If the correspondence boxes are checked, next I will look to make sure within this Responsible Party's relationship screen they have not opted out AND that they have an email address and phone number listed in the RP level contact information. This person has contact information and has NOT opted out. If they had, their would be an exclamation point here indicating they had opted out of text messages or unsubscribed from email reminders. If they were missing contact information in the responsible party level, their would be no entries listed under contact information. (Note: To see how they can opt back in, go to question number 5.)
III. Now that I have checked that the setup is correct for the Responsible Party, I will navigate to the Reminders Dashboard to check on the reminders set for their upcoming appointment. For more details on this function in C9 Connect please see this article C9 Connect Reminders Dashboard.
I will go into View > Reminders Dashboard in Cloud 9. I will pick the appropriate filters on the left hand side, (location and appointment date) and then click search to see the results. I will click the plus sign to expand on the reminder information and view information about when the reminder was sent. I can see that the save the date text and email reminder were both sent to this responsible party, and it does show the time stamp and that it was sent via the automation, (the setup in Appointment Campaigns.) At this point, I can check with the responsible party and make sure that they have the sending email saved to their contacts and it didn't go to spam, and maybe double check that the phone and email information is correct, as the system states both reminders went through with no problems. (screenshot below.)
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Q: How can I tell when a patient or responsible party is opted out of text or email reminders, and how can I fix this?
A: When you go into Edit > Patient > Relationships tab, click edit on the relationship of the person who is financially responsible. Then look at their contact information at that level. If they have opted out it will look like this. (screenshot below.)
In order to fix this, the responsible party must text START back to the number that sent them the text reminder or two way message. If they no longer have the phone number, your practice should have a record of the number that sent the message, but we can also look that up in the lookup if you contact Cloud 9 Support.
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Q: I have checked and confirmed the responsible party setup is correct but my patient/RP is still receiving the incorrect type of reminder, how can I diagnose and fix this?
A: If you have already looked to make sure that they are receiving reminders in the Reminders dashboard, (covered above in question 4), and that they have their contact information set up and have not opted out and can confirm they are not receiving the correct reminder could be a couple of different things.
I. Scenario 1: This patient should have received the save the date reminder, but instead received the day before reminder. In this scenario, I would first look in the View > Reminders Dashboard and search the dates and also enter the patients last name to pull up the results. Sometimes when a reminder is sent and it is the incorrect one, it will be an employee has sent it manually and selected the wrong one. That is what happened in this case, when this happens you will see the name of the person to the right of the sent reminder instead of the word automated.
For this example, the reason the wrong reminder received is it was manually sent and in the drop down the day before was chosen instead of the save the date. (Example of this shown below.)
Note: The options in these drop downs are Alphabetical. This cannot be changed, but if you want one to be the first option listed you can put A in front of the name to have it show up first in the list.
II. Scenario 2: This patient should have received the follow up appointment reminder email after they were checked out of their appointment and it was sent automated, this has been checked in the Reminders Dashboard.
If we look in View > Reminders Dashboard and look up Test, Brady, we see that this appointment is dismissed and last email reminder sent should be the follow up one. We can see in the screenshot below that it was sent automated but it sent the day of appointment reminder, not the follow up appointment reminder.
Since we have confirmed this, we can now go into Edit > Automation Suite > Appointment Campaigns and look at our setup. Let's go to the Roswell location, and hover the mouse curser over the follow up email notification icon, (the envelope.) Hovering there will show us which template is set to send.
We can see that in this case, the follow up template is incorrect. The setup is sending the day of appointment reminder email when it should be the follow up template. To change this, we can click on the envelope and bring up this screen and make sure we select the follow up appointment reminder.
Once we hit save the changes will take effect. It will only send for future ones, not ones that have already sent, but sometimes the cause of the incorrect appointment reminder could be the wrong template selected in Edit > Automation Suite > Appointment Campaigns.
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Q: My morning appointments are not receiving their reminders, everything is set up in the Responsible Party's Relationships contact info set, they are not opted out, and their correspondence boxes are checked. I also checked the setup for Appointment Campaigns and that appears correct as well, how can I fix this?
A: We see this sometimes when the default times of when appointment reminders set do not match with the settings in the Edit > Automation Suite > Appointment Campaigns. To check this, look at your day of reminder. If you have that set to go out 3 hours before the appointment as a last reminder, you need to make sure the default settings for when appointment reminders send are set to three hours before your first appointment. To check this go into Edit > Automation Suite > Appointment Campaigns. On the practice level click the defaults button here:
This will then take you to the screen where you can set the time the reminders send and set any overrides for specialties or appointment types. Make sure the beginning time is set to match how many hours before appointment the day of sends, and then save the changes.
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Q: Why can my patients/responsible parties confirm the appointment reminders? What will the difference look like when they are confirmed?
A: The first place to check is in the Edit > Automation Suite > Appointment Campaigns to check if that particular reminder is set to confirmable. Click on any reminder in the routine or rule you are looking at and if it has this checked, it is confirmable.
If it is not marked here, check mark and and click save. If you select the second option, ignore if confirmed, this means if the patient has already confirmed the appointment, it will NOT send out this reminder to them, since they marked confirmed on a previous reminder.
This is what the appointment reminder in View > Reminders Dashboard will look like once it is confirmed.
For the patients/RP's, on their end in a text reminder it will say reply C to confirm. Then, if they send C to the number that sent the appointment reminder text, it will mark the appointment as confirmed. In an email reminder, there will be a link they can click to mark it as confirmed.
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Q: When I go to check on a reminder for one patient, it has a red exclamation point, and the patient states they did not receive the reminder, what does this mean?
A: If you go into View > Reminders Dashboard, locate the patient and click the plus to expand their appointment reminder details, if a reminder had an error and didn't send, it will have a red exclamation mark, shown in the screenshot below. You can hover over the red exclamation mark to see details about the error.
As we can see from hovering over this one, the email dropped and was unable to send. They could have marked the sending email as Spam, or the email inbox could be deleted/shut down. If you have questions about a specific error, please contact Support, we are happy to help further!
As always, if you have any further questions please do not hesitate to reach out to Cloud 9 Support by emailing us at cloud9support@planetdds.com, or chatting us online using the chat bubble on the lower right at https://cloud9support.planetdds.com/hc/en-us, or giving us a call during our business hours of 8:00 AM EST to 8:00 PM EST at the 1.800.394.6050 option 2.