Removing Phantom or Ghost Appointments

Owned by John Bellos (Unlicensed)
Apr 05, 2016

Affected Versions: DVMAX 7.5 and Below

This document serves as a guide for removing ghost/phantom appointments. It is highly technical and should be execute only by a DVMAX representative, but the guide has been made public to educate our users that this issue can occur and there is a fix for it.

Issue: Applying a Schedule to a date range can cause 'blank' appointments to appear and overlap on a given column.
'Clear Schedule' does not remove these records.

Cause: Having the 'Show Appointment Labels' setting in System Constants unchecked causes this issue to occur.

Solution: Make sure the Show Appointment Labels setting is ON in System Constants.
If you do not like this feature, then only have it checked when applying your schedules.


Step 1: Identify the issue

Before fixing the issue, you must identify:

  • A specific column affected on the schedule.
  • A date and time of an affected appointment.


Step 2: Find and Select all Phantom Appointments based on a commonality

  • Open the Data Editor in DVMAX.
  • Based on the information obtained in Step 1, first navigate to the Appt_Staff table and locate the Staff_ID for the affected column.
  • Move to the New_Appts table. Query for records that have a Start_Date and Start_Time identified in Step 1, and have a Col_ID that matches the Staff_ID you found on the Appt_Staff table.
  • This should identify the 'phantom' appt record in question. Identify the characteristics of this record. Note the:
  • LabelID (must be 0 - important)
  • Color (usually 209)
  • Patient ID, Client and Comments should be blank or 0, indicating the record has not been used.
  • Now search the New_Appts table for all phantom appointments. Do a Query for:
    • Start_Date >= Date of affected records
    • AND LabelID = 0
    • AND Col_ID = Affected Staff_ID
    • AND ClientID = 0


Step 3: Verify affected records and Delete

After you've performed step 2, you should have a list of records that match.
VERIFY that your search result is accurate.

  • ALL records in the list should have a ClientID and PatientID of 0.
  • ALL records should be blank in the Comments field.
  • ALL records should have a LabelID of 0.

If all of this is true, delete the selection of records.

Step 4: Fix the root cause

Having the Show Appointment Labels setting checked in System Constants as explained at the beginning of the document will prevent the problem from happening again, but the phantom records still exist in the Recurring Schedule. Below are the steps to remove these phantom record templates.

Navigate back to the New_Appts table and search for:

  • Start_Date <= 1/1/85
  • AND LabelID = 0


This will show you all the 'hidden' appts that are causing the phantom appts to appear when the DVMAX user clicks 'Apply Schedule'.

Verify the resulting list has:

  • A LabelID of 0
  • Empty Comments
  • A Start_Date of 1985 or earlier

Delete the selection of records.