1. Cortico online booking 

Please review this short video to make sure you know how patients book an appointment online:

Cortico - How to book appointments for existing family doctor patients

Appointment booked through Cortico will have "Cortico" as a creator in Oscar. 
Cortico does not have "delete appointment" functionality, so if you don't see their appointment in Oscar, please check:

  • if patients have confirmation email of their appointment: sometimes patients forget to submit the request so no appointment is created in Cortico and patients also do not receive confirmation email. 
  • check appointment history in Oscar, click "delete" button to see whether the appointment accidentally gets deleted by the MOA (if patients have received a confirmation email)
  • special characters such as [], {} should be reserved for Cortico to make sure MOA does not input wrong syntax in the reason for visit field in Oscar, which can potentially result in an issue. 

2. Appointment types and email reminders

Cortico differentiates appointment types by the "resources" (or "location") field in Oscar:

  • "clinic" - in-clinic visit
  • "phone" - phone appointment
  • "virtual' - video appointment
  • Blank or n/a: generic reminder is sent
  • "Quiet" - NO email reminder is sent

Please note: You must select an appointment type if you want the email reminders to be sent. If the resources field is left blank, no email reminders will be sent.

Cortico sends out email reminders to patients 7 days and 2 days in advance of their appointment time. Here are things you should know:

  1. Appointments booked through Cortico will have email reminders 7 days and 2 days in advance.
  2. Appointments booked by MOAs/clinic, with indication of the appointment types (exactly "clinic", "phone", "virtual" - case sensitive) in the "resources" field or "location field", will also have email reminders 7 days and 2 days in advance. 
  3. Appointments booked by MOAs, with an empty resources field, will have email reminders without indication of the appointment type
  4. To prevent email reminders to be sent out (e.g. care conference appointments between physicians), MOAs should put some characters that are not the indications of the appointment types (e.g. "quiet") in the resources field. A quicker way is to select "quiet" from the "resources" dropdown by installing the our Oscar Plug-in
  5. Email reminders are sent at 6:00 PDT every day, so any appointments booked on the same day or 1 day in advance will not get a reminder.

2.1 Video appointments

Patient books a phone appointment, but doctor would need to see the patient via the video conferencing. How can MOAs triage that?

Here are the steps:

  • in Oscar: change the appointment medium to "virtual" in the patient's appointment details
  • go to clinicname.cortico.ca and login to your given MOA account
  • go to the appointment time, click on "email the link"
    We confirm if the email is sent successfully on top of Cortico schedule page. 

3. Cortico - cancel/review appointments

Patients can cancel/review/confirm their appointment through the patient portal which is linked in their appointment confirmation email.

Click here to learn more about the patient portal!

Patients can also cancel appointments through the Cortico website. Click here to learn more about how patients can do this with the specialized clinic appointment review link.

Patients will not be able to cancel their appointment within 24 hours. They have to email the clinic to get it cancelled.

Appointment Booking Policy. This is shown at the start of the online booking with:

Cancellation policy: This is shown before a patient completes an online booking with late cancellation fee policy included. 

Allowing last minute cancellations?
We have tried allowing patients to cancel appointments last-minute, and the issue is patients will take advantage of this over time, knowing they can cancel any time. The best solution many clinics have found is to manually process the cancellation so the clinic manager can decide whether a late fee applies or the patient had an extenuating situation and gets an exception.

4. Troubleshooting

Please learn how to troubleshoot common issues here.

Cortico is developing new features to help clinics over time. Occasionally, after new feature is implemented, there is a bug that could be missed during the Quality Assurance testing. Please notify us at help@cortico.ca for the urgent bug fix. 

5. Tips for clinic management

To run a clinic using Cortico, you will want to shift most of your remote patient communication to email instead of phone. So, create a shared email address for all your MOAs to handle patient inquiries, if you haven’t already. There are several benefits of this.

Cortico already talks to patients via email for the most common cases, so they are comfortable with this medium in most cases. For the less common corner cases Cortico does not handle, it’s natural for patients to interact with an MOA via email.

With a shared clinic email account, MOAs can see the history of patient conversations when their shift ends, so nobody gets confused about what happened on prior phone calls if a new MOA answers the phone.

MOAs can handle all the patient emails at once, instead of being interrupted by phone calls.

Should you have other questions, please see our FAQs or email it to help@cortico.ca


Thank you!

-- Cortico Team --