Athenahealth Features That Will Make Your Life Easier: Part 3- Appointment Tickler Alarms

Welcome to Part 3 of our series highlighting underutilized athenahealth features that can simplify your day-to-day. In this post, we’re looking at Appointment Tickler Alarms—a tool that helps ensure follow-up visits don’t fall through the cracks.

What Are Appointment Tickler Alarms?

Appointment Tickler Alarms are used to notify staff when a patient needs to be contacted for a future appointment. They act like built-in reminders, especially valuable when a return visit isn’t scheduled at the time of service.

This feature is especially useful for:

• Post-op follow-ups

• Annual wellness visits

• Specialist referrals that require long lead times

How Do They Work?

When using an alarm on a Return to Office or Appointment Tickler, athenaOne will create a new task in the “Need Followup” section of the clinical inbox if the date of the requested Return to Office passes and the patient still has not made an appointment. This is not to be confused with the “Appointments to Schedule” capability which also tracks Return to Office reminders but does so on the Non-clinical Inbox or Workflow Dashboard.

The “Appointments to Schedule” feature begins tracking Return to Office reminders prior to the date requested for followup, while the alarm on the Return to Office waits for the date requested for followup to pass before creating a new task in the “Need Followup” section of the inbox. We suggest only using the alarm on the Return to Office/Tickler if there is a high priority follow up visit that a provider wants to ensure isn’t overlooked, otherwise only the “Appointments to Schedule” feature should be utilized and it should be owned by a member of the scheduling team or front office team.

Did you know this athena feature existed? If not, let's chat! We'd love to help you implement these at your practice to be more efficient!