The ASAP List in Open Dental is the list of patients who would like to be contacted when an earlier appointment becomes available. You reach it in the Appointments module by clicking Lists, then ASAP. It is not a fourth list of unscheduled patients. It is a flag you attach to appointments that already exist somewhere else, plus a queue Open Dental works through in a fixed order.
That second half is where most practices lose the chair. A 1:00pm crown cancels at 12:40pm, somebody texts the ASAP list, nothing comes back, and the hour is written off. The list was not the problem. The send rules were. Fewer of those holes open in the first place when confirmation is a two way commitment rather than a one way reminder, which we covered in dental appointment confirmation, and what you do in the ten minutes after a chair does go empty is in our dental no show policy guide. This guide covers where the list lives, the four ways a patient gets onto it, why half your list is invisible when a hole opens, and a lead time rule for when to blast and when to pick up the phone. Menu names below follow Open Dental's own manual.
What is the ASAP List in Open Dental?
The ASAP List shows patients who want to come in sooner if an opening appears. Open Dental's Appointment Lists manual page describes it as "a list of patients who would like to come in as soon as an opening is available," and notes that scheduled appointments, Planned Appointments and unscheduled recall appointments can all be marked ASAP. It is a marker on existing records, not a separate pool of patients.
That distinction matters because it tells you where the entries come from. A patient booked eight weeks out, a planned crown nobody has scheduled, a no show sitting on the Unscheduled List, and a hygiene patient overdue for recall can all carry the same ASAP flag at the same time. The three lists that actually hold unscheduled treatment are a separate subject, covered in our guide to the Open Dental unscheduled treatment lists.
The window itself is useful beyond the flag. It stays open while you work elsewhere in Open Dental, and you can schedule directly from it. Right click any row and you get Select Patient, See Chart, Send to Pinboard, and Remove from ASAP. Send to Pinboard is the one you will use most: it parks the appointment so you can drag it straight onto the open slot.
Where is the ASAP List, and what is on each tab?
In the Appointments module toolbar, click Lists, then ASAP. The ASAP List window opens on the Appointments tab, which shows scheduled, unscheduled, planned and broken appointments that have been marked ASAP. A second tab, Unscheduled Recalls, shows patients whose recall is marked Schedule ASAP, even if they have already had a recall reminder.
The filters on the Appointments tab are Provider, Clinic, Site, Code Range, Appointment status, and a Show selector for All Appointments, Non Hygiene Appointments, or Hygiene Appointments. Click Refresh after changing any of them. Code Range is the underused one. If your open slot is a hygiene column, filter to hygiene and stop scrolling past restorative cases you cannot use.
One trap lives on the second tab. The Unscheduled Recalls tab has Start and End dates that decide which patients appear, based on recall due date, and the manual says they default to the current week. A practice that flags recall patients as Schedule ASAP all year and then only ever looks at the default view sees a fraction of its own list. Widen the dates before you judge whether the list is empty.
There is also a Print List button on whichever tab is open, and ASAP can be set as a display option in Appointment Views so the flag is visible on the schedule itself rather than only inside the list window.
How does a patient get on the ASAP List?
There are exactly four ways, and Open Dental's manual names all of them. Mark a scheduled appointment as ASAP in Edit Appointment, where ASAP sits among the appointment Status options and "Lists the appointment on the ASAP List." Mark a Planned Appointment as ASAP. Double click an appointment in the Unscheduled List to mark it ASAP. Or tick Schedule ASAP on a patient's recall.
| Route onto the list | Where you set it | Typical patient |
|---|---|---|
| Scheduled appointment marked ASAP | Edit Appointment, Status | Booked six weeks out, would take next Tuesday |
| Planned Appointment marked ASAP | Chart, Planned Appts | Treatment diagnosed and never scheduled |
| Unscheduled appointment marked ASAP | Unscheduled List, double click the row | Last week's no show who wants back in soon |
| Recall marked Schedule ASAP | Edit Recall | Overdue hygiene patient with a flexible schedule |
Notice what is missing from that table: anything automatic. Nothing lands on the ASAP List on its own. Somebody has to decide, at a moment when the patient is in front of them or on the phone, that this person would take a sooner slot.
Why is your ASAP List empty?
Because nobody asks. The flag is set by hand, and the only reliable moment to set it is while you are booking the appointment, when the patient has just heard a date they are not thrilled about. If the question is not part of the booking script, the list stays empty and every cancellation becomes a cold call to somebody who never volunteered.
Make it a rule with a threshold, not a judgment call. Something like: any patient booked more than three weeks out gets asked, every time. Pick your own number from your own schedule. The point is that it stops being optional.
Two questions, asked in this order, at the moment you say the date out loud:
"That's the first opening I have with Dr. [Name]. If something opens up sooner, would you want me to call you?"
If yes, the follow up question is the one that actually makes the list workable:
"How much notice would you need? Same day, or a day or two?"
Write the answer in the appointment note and set the flag. Now your list is not a wish list. It is sorted by the only variable that matters at 12:40pm, which is who can physically get here. A patient who needs two days of notice is not a candidate for this afternoon, and knowing that before you dial saves you four calls.
Set the same flag in the same breath for the other three routes. When a no show goes onto the Unscheduled List, ask whether they want the next opening. When a planned crown does not get scheduled, ask. When the hygienist cannot rebook someone at the chair, ask.
Why do half the patients on your list never get the text?
Because Open Dental filters the send before you see it. When you open the ASAP List from an available slot and use Web Sched ASAP, the manual says all appointments "whose length fits within the Start/End time will be selected by default." A list full of 90 minute crowns is effectively invisible when a 40 minute hygiene hole appears.
Four more filters sit on top of that, and each one quietly removes people:
- Texting requires the Integrated Texting feature, and the patient needs a wireless number on file with text messages allowed. Email requires an email address. A patient with neither is on your list and unreachable by the tool.
- There is a cap on Web Sched texts per patient per day, set in ASAP Message Setup, and it defaults to 2. On a bad Tuesday with three cancellations, your most flexible patients hit the ceiling first.
- Once a patient opts out of future ASAP notifications for an appointment, they stop receiving text and email ASAP notifications for it. They stay on your list looking available.
- Notifications only send if the opening is at least 20 minutes after the send time. Inside twenty minutes, the tool will not help you at all.
That last one is worth sitting with. Open Dental also has a preference to prompt staff to send a Web Sched message when an appointment is broken, and the manual states the prompt does not appear if the appointment time starts within the next 20 minutes. The software is telling you something true about its own limits. Under twenty minutes, this is a phone call or it is nothing.
Which means the fix for an underperforming ASAP list is usually not a better message. It is matching the length of what is on the list to the shape of the holes you actually get, and keeping mobile numbers current at check in. If your holes are mostly hygiene, your list needs hygiene patients on it. Our guide to appointment types, codes and chair time covers the mapping side of that.
Should you call or text when a chair opens?
It depends entirely on how far away the opening is, because Open Dental staggers its ASAP texts by exactly that variable. The manual publishes the intervals: every minute when the slot is less than 2 hours out, every 2 minutes between 2 and 12 hours, every 4 minutes between 12 and 48 hours, and every 8 minutes beyond 48 hours.
Do the arithmetic on your own list before the next cancellation. Thirty patients at 4 minute intervals is roughly two hours to work through the queue. That is fine for tomorrow morning. It is useless for this afternoon.
| Opening is | Open Dental sends | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| More than 48 hours out | Every 8 minutes | Blast it and let the queue run. No calls needed. |
| 12 to 48 hours out | Every 4 minutes | Blast it, then call your top three while the queue works. |
| 2 to 12 hours out | Every 2 minutes | Call first, blast second. The phone will beat the queue. |
| Under 2 hours | Every minute, and nothing sends inside 20 minutes | Call. Only call. |
Treat that as a starting rule and adjust it to your own list size. A practice with eight people on its ASAP List can blast a two hour opening and be fine. A practice with sixty cannot.
Two details change the math in your favour. Emails send immediately when you click Send rather than following the staggered schedule, so a patient with an email address on file may hear from you before the text queue reaches them. And you can highlight specific patients before sending, which is how you get out of queue order entirely. If you do not select anyone, all patients with a wireless number are auto selected.
How does Open Dental decide who gets texted first?
Not by who has waited longest, and not by who lives closest. The Web Sched ASAP manual page sets out the order explicitly: texts go to unscheduled appointments first, then scheduled appointments, then recalls, and within that, appointments that are farthest in the future are sent first. The logic is that the people with the least to lose by moving get asked first.
Three more mechanics are worth knowing before you rely on a blast:
- Texts only send inside the automated eServices time window. Anything scheduled to send after the end time goes at the end time instead, not overnight. A blast fired at 7:40am may sit until the window opens.
- A blockout appears on the schedule over the opening so the team can see a Web Sched ASAP message has gone out. It is informational only, cannot be edited, and is removed by right clicking and choosing Delete Web Schedule ASAP Blockout.
- A commlog entry is added to each patient's account when an ASAP text is sent, so the record of who was contacted exists without anybody typing it.
The default messages live in ASAP Message Setup, along with template tags for the patient's first name, the date, the time, the office name, the office phone and the booking link. Clinics can each carry their own wording or inherit the default. It is worth ten minutes to rewrite the default text, because the stock message reads like a system notification and the reply rate on a message that sounds like your front desk is a different thing entirely.
How do you keep the list trustworthy?
Run a five minute pass once a week, before anybody needs it. A list nobody trusts is a list nobody works, and an ASAP List that still contains last spring's patients is worse than an empty one, because it burns calls on people who already got treated somewhere else.
Three things, in order:
- Open the Appointments tab and remove anyone whose reason has expired. Right click, Remove from ASAP. The patient who wanted a sooner crown and has since had it done should not be on the list.
- Open the Unscheduled Recalls tab and widen the Start and End dates past the default current week. Work whatever appears there into your normal recall cadence rather than treating it as a separate list, using the system in our hygiene recall guide.
- Check that the notice window you recorded at booking is still in the appointment note. People's circumstances change. A patient who said "same day is fine" in July may now have a job that makes that impossible.
Then do the part most practices skip: name the owner. One person, not "the front desk." Filling a chair is outbound work under time pressure, and outbound work is the first thing dropped when the phone rings, which is the argument behind our daily front desk checklist.
Who works the list when the phone is ringing?
This is the real constraint, and it is worth being honest about before you write a process nobody has time to run. A chair goes empty at 12:40pm. The person who would work the ASAP List is the person answering the phone, checking out the 12:30 patient, and taking an insurance call. The list is not the bottleneck. The hour is.
There is a second version of the same problem that practices rarely account for. A Web Sched ASAP text carries a link patients can click to accept, but plenty of patients do not click links. They call the office back. If your blast went out at 11:50am and the callbacks land while the team is at lunch, the opening you were trying to fill gets filled by voicemail instead.
Telvana answers those calls day and night, screens the caller against your practice's rules, and books the visit straight into Open Dental with the right appointment type, chair time and procedure code attached. It handles reschedules and after hours triage, and routes the large cases to your team rather than trying to close them. The mechanics of how the booking lands in your schedule are in our guide to Open Dental AI scheduling and write back, and the broader picture is in our guide to AI receptionists for dental practices.
Frequently asked questions
Where is the ASAP List in Open Dental?
In the Appointments module toolbar, click Lists, then ASAP. The window opens on the Appointments tab showing scheduled, unscheduled, planned and broken appointments marked ASAP, with a second tab for patients whose recall is marked Schedule ASAP. The window is non modal, so it can stay open while you work elsewhere in Open Dental.
How do I add a patient to the ASAP List?
Four ways. Set ASAP as the Status in Edit Appointment on a scheduled appointment, mark a Planned Appointment as ASAP, double click an appointment in the Unscheduled List to mark it ASAP, or tick Schedule ASAP on the patient's recall. Nothing is added automatically, so the flag has to be part of your booking routine.
What is the difference between the ASAP List and the Unscheduled List?
The Unscheduled List is a short holding pen for no shows and cancellations that need rebooking. The ASAP List is a flag for patients who want an earlier appointment, and it can sit on appointments in the Unscheduled List, on the schedule, in the Planned Appointment Tracker, or on a recall. One is a place, the other is a marker.
Why did my ASAP text not reach a patient on the list?
Common reasons, all from the send rules: their appointment length did not fit the open slot, they have no wireless number or texts are not allowed on their record, they hit the daily cap on Web Sched texts, they previously opted out of ASAP notifications for that appointment, or the opening was less than 20 minutes away, which stops notifications entirely.
Can I fill a same day cancellation with the ASAP List?
Sometimes, but do not rely on it alone. Inside 20 minutes nothing sends. Inside 2 hours texts go out every minute, which still means a long list takes a while to work through. For a same day hole, call your shortest notice patients first and use the text as backup rather than the other way round.
Should the ASAP List include recall patients?
Yes, and they get their own tab. Unlike the Unscheduled List and the Planned Appointment Tracker, which the manual says should not include recall appointments, the ASAP List explicitly supports recalls marked Schedule ASAP. Just remember the tab defaults to the current week by recall due date.
Fill the chair without giving up the phone
If your ASAP List is healthy and still nothing gets filled, the constraint is almost certainly that the person who should be dialling is the person answering. Telvana answers every patient call, applies your rules, and books the visit straight into Open Dental with the code attached, so the callbacks from your ASAP blast land on something that can actually book them. Book a demo and bring a week of your own cancellations.
