Repeating Appointments

Repeating Appointments
MacPractice allows you to repeat an appointment at regular intervals for patients who need to be seen on a recurring basis. This document will cover the steps to repeat an appointment, the options available when repeating and how to delete a repeated appointment.

Repeating Appointments - Create
To create a repeating appointment, schedule the first occurrence as you would schedule any other appointment. Then, select the appointment you would like to repeat. The appointment will have a highlighted line around it, indicating it is currently selected.


Open your MacPractice Drawer, and select the Appointment tab. In the upper half of the window, you will see some information about the selected appointment. In the lower half of the drawer, you will see two tabs: Treatments and Repeats. The Treatments tab will display a list of any treatment plan items that are associated to the appointment. The Repeats tab allows you to set up the repeating appointment. Check the Repeat Appointment checkbox to activate the fields.

The first line in the repeat area allows you to set how the repeat frequency. Select the time period (Day(s), Week(s), Month(s), Year(s)) from the pop-up button, then enter how often the appointment should repeat. In the example below, the appointment will repeat every 2 weeks. If we changed the pop-up button to Day(s), it would repeat every 2 days. Use the End fields to determine how long you would like the repeats to continue. You can choose After times or On Date. If you select After Times, enter the number of repetitions in the provided field. For example, you may wish the appointment to repeat 30 times. In that case, enter 30 in the field. Note: The "After times" feature does not count the first occurrence of the appointment. So, if you wanted 30 total appointments, you would enter "29" in the field. If you select On Date, simply enter the date you wish the repetitions to cease.


When you have finished selecting your options, save your changes by going up to the Edit menu and selecting Save Record, or using the Command-S keyboard shortcut.

Note: When you save a repeating appointment, all information in the original appointment will be populated to the future repetitions, including Status, Type, Notes, and so on. That means if your original appointment is set to "Confirmed", all the repeating appointments associated to it will also have a status of "Confirmed". If the original appointment has a note indicating "Patient is running late", all future repetitions of the appointment will have the same note.


You will see an alert, asking if you are sure you wish to create the repetitions. The alert will also inform you that if a repeating appointment would conflict with an existing appointment, the repeat appointment will NOT be created for that occurrence.

Repeating Appointments - Delete

You can delete a repeating appointment by  selecting the repeat record in the Repeats tab of the Appointment drawer and pressing the Delete key. An alert will appear with three options:

• Delete Appointment & Repeat - Select this option to remove the appointment from the schedule, and delete the repeat line from the drawer.
• Cancel - Click this button to make no changes, and return to the previous screen.
• Delete Only Repeat Information - This will delete the Repeated Appointment entry in the Appointments drawer, but will leave the appointment intact.

Repeat Appointments - Manually Linking Appointments

If there is a repeating appointment record that does not have an appointment associated to it, it will be displayed in red in the Appointments drawer.

Double-click the red line to go to the date and time the appointment should be scheduled for. Create the appointment as you would usually, then drag the appointment box to the red line in the drawer to link the appointment to the repeat record.