Configuring notifications and reminders

Notifications decide how clinic events reach your team and your patients — a new booking, a chat message, a completed consent, an upcoming appointment. Too few and things get missed; too many and everyone tunes them out. This page is where you strike that balance.

The Notifications page

Go to Settings → Notifications — "shape how clinic events reach the team and patients".

The Notifications settings page, showing email and SMS defaults

The page has two cards of channel defaults:

Organization email defaults — "baseline email notifications for the whole organization. Members can override the ones sent to them."
Organization SMS defaults — "baseline text-message notifications for appointment, chat, and form moments." The SMS card needs a provisioned phone number (Settings → Omnichannel); until one exists the toggles are disabled.

The list of notifications comes straight from the platform, grouped by category — Account & lifecycle, Appointments, Messaging, and Forms & consents — and each row says whether it's sent to patients or to your team. When Ona adds a notification type, it appears here automatically.

Appointment reminders

Below the defaults, the Appointment reminders section schedules automatic messages before each visit. Turn the master switch on, then add rules — for example a confirmation request 3 days out, a reminder the day before, and another an hour before.

Each rule has:

When — how long before the appointment it sends (minutes, hours, or days).
Kind — a plain reminder, or a confirmation request that carries a one-tap link for the patient to confirm attendance (or tell you they can't make it).
Channels — email, SMS, or both. Patient texts additionally require the patient's SMS consent.
Enabled — pause a rule without deleting it.

Two settings sit underneath: patient channel defaults (what patients who haven't stated a preference receive) and stop reminders after confirmation (once a patient confirms, their remaining reminders for that visit are skipped).

Schedule changes apply to new bookings immediately and to existing appointments within a day; channel and template changes apply immediately to everything. Individual services can override the practice schedule from the service editor (Services → edit → Reminders).

When a patient confirms, the visit shows a check mark on the schedule. Patients can also reply to the reminder text — YES confirms, RESCHEDULE asks the practice to call back.

Message templates

The Message templates editor opens from the notifications page (Edit templates) in a side panel and covers every notification × channel pair — pick a notification and a channel to load its template. Templates marked Default use Ona's built-in copy; edit one and it becomes Customised, with a Reset to default action to go back.

The editor offers the variables each notification supports (like {{patientFirstName}} or {{appointmentDate}}), validates that you only reference variables the notification provides, and shows a live preview as you type. For SMS it also counts characters and estimated message segments — including the "Reply STOP to opt out." line appended to every patient text.

Variables render exactly as provided: a missing value becomes an empty string, so keep connective words like "on" or "at" inside the value, not the template.

Defaults vs. personal overrides

The key phrase is "members can override the ones sent to them." What you set here is the organization default — the starting point for everyone. In the Your email and Your SMS cards, individuals tune the notifications addressed to them without changing the org baseline. Patient-facing sends are controlled only at the organization level.

So set these defaults for the sensible middle: the notifications most of your team will want on. Leave the ones that are noise for some people off by default, and let those who want them opt in. A default that's too loud gets muted wholesale, which is worse than a quieter default people choose to turn up.

Choosing email vs. SMS

The two channels suit different things. Email carries detail and doesn't interrupt; SMS is immediate but intrusive and, for patients, may cost them a message. A good rule: SMS for the time-sensitive and patient-facing (an appointment reminder), email for the informational and internal (an interview came back). Patients only ever receive texts after giving express consent — recorded on their profile or in their portal — and can opt out any time by replying STOP.

A few small settings pages sit alongside this one and simply switch a feature on or off for the whole organization:

Food Journal (Settings → Food Journal) — "let patients log meals and clinicians review nutrition trends." A single toggle. Turn it on for practices where diet is part of care (functional or integrative medicine); leave it off otherwise.
Charting (Settings → Charting) — which charting sections appear (see Choosing which charting sections appear).
Inventory (Settings → Inventory) — stock tracking on or off (see Managing inventory).

These share a pattern: an organization-wide switch that turns a capability on for everyone, rather than per-user settings.