Missed appointments (MIA)

Every practice has patients who book an appointment and then don't arrive. The MIA (Missing In Action) list is ChiroPad's tracking system for those patients, together with a log of what your staff did about each one.

Turning the list on

On the Scheduled Patient tab, tick MIA.

Today's schedule moves down and the list of unresolved missed appointments appears above it. Untick MIA and you are back to today's schedule only.

Turn this on for one person, not everyone

MIA is meant for whoever is responsible for following up on missed appointments. For everyone else it is a longer list to scroll past every time they look at the schedule. Because the setting is per-user, the follow-up person can work the list all day while nobody else sees it.

Resolving a missed appointment

"Resolving" a missed appointment means recording what you did about it — called the patient, left a message, rescheduled — so the practice has a history rather than a pile of names.

1. On the MIA list, open the patient's Actions menu.
2. Choose Resolve appointment / view log.

The Appointment Resolution window has two tabs:

Tab	What it gives you
Appointment	Record the action taken and set a follow-up reminder
Patient Information	The patient's phone numbers, plus a financial overview of the account

Recording what you did

1. Select the Action Taken by Staff that fits what happened.
2. Click New.

The action is written into the log below with a date and time stamp. You can type extra detail alongside it — worth doing when the outcome was not clean ("spouse answered, patient travelling until the 14th").

Setting a follow-up reminder

For actions that need chasing later, set Next Alert: a number from 1 to 99, and whether it means minutes, hours, or days.

Whether the reminder actually returns depends on the Status:

Status	Result
Open	The patient stays on the MIA list and the reminder reappears at the time you set
Anything else	The patient comes off the MIA list and no reminder appears

Some actions close the item for you

Choosing an action such as Rescheduled automatically moves the status off Open — which is usually what you want, since the appointment is no longer missing. If you still want a reminder, set the status back to Open before saving.

Turning off the pop-ups

Appointment Resolution reminders pop up for whoever has them enabled. Useful for the person doing the follow-up; an interruption for providers and everyone else.

On the Signed In Patient tab, tick Suppress Appointment Resolution Popup to stop them appearing for you. Like the MIA list itself, this is a per-user setting.

Deciding when it stops being a scheduling call

The Patient Information tab shows the account's financial position next to the phone numbers, so the person calling can see what they are dealing with before they dial. At some point an unreturned patient with an outstanding balance stops being a rescheduling call and becomes a collections call — where that line falls is a decision for practice management, not something the software decides for you.