SMS and email appointment reminders are great at reminding your patients about their appointment, this article covers their configuration to ensure you're sending the right information when you need it sent.

• Configuring automatic reminders and replies
• SMS Replies and appointment reminders

Configuring automatic reminders and replies

To specify the automated reminders and replies strategy with up to 3 staggered actions, for SMS Replies configuration.
This is an excellent and easy-to-use tool for reducing FTA rates as well as providing a way of reminding patients of their appointment time, proving link’s to patient portal forms and important information.

1. Go to Configure - Automatic Appointment Messages.
2. Select the Reminders tab along the top of the window.
   
3. You can setup up to 3 automated messages. With the settings options:
   
   • Type - Choose whether the message will be an SMS or email.
   • Delivery Time - Choose the time period (Hours/Days./Weeks) and the number of that time unit.
   • Template - Choose the email/SMS template to send. More information on how to configure templates can be found here [add template article later]
4. Select or create a template.
   
   • Click in the Template field and use the List button to select a template.
   • If you select Email in the Type drop-down, the List button will show email templates, and if you select SMS in the Type drop-down, only SMS templates will be listed.
     +
5. You can choose to send the previous reminder to catch up, if your server was powered off or the appointment was created after the reminder is pre-configured to send. Tick the box for this option to be enabled.
6. Choose how your reminders function if a patient has multiple appointments in the same day,
   • Select Only send a single reminder, to send one reminder for the earliest appointment in the day.
   • or select Send a reminder for each appointment, to send one for every appointment.
     

     Tip: If you change between the above options, we recommend checking the merge fields being used in your templates. Alternative merge fields are available for listing multi-appointment information. If you need to check this, read the section Checking merge fields in this article.

7. Click OK to save your changes.

Checking merge fields

Depending on the choice selected above, we recommend to check the merge fields you have configured in your reminder templates. You can check this, by identifying the templates being used, these will be displayed in the appointment reminder configuration.

Take note of the template names, then,

1. Navigate to Configure then either Email Templates or SMS Templates.
2. Select the template, using the selection button then, opening the relevant template.
3. Merge fields will be displayed in square brackets as such [patient.nextapptdate].
4. The following merge fields are available to display multiple appointments in one reminder:
   1. patient.nextapptdateALL will display all of the appointment times a patient has for the day. For example, “Fri 18 Jan at 10:00am” for a single appointment or “Fri 18 Jan at 10:00am & 11:00am” for multiple appointments.
   2. patient.nextapptdateALLwithprovider will display all of the appointment times (including provider details) a patient has for the day. For example, “Fri 18 Jan at 10:00am with Dr. Jo Smith” for a single appointment or “Fri 18 Jan at 10:00am with Dr. Jo Smith & 11:00am with Dr. Jane Bloggs” for multiple appointments.

SMS Replies and appointment reminders

SMS Replies are designed to function with automated reminders sent to Patients. The software links the pending appointment, the automated SMS Reminder, and the patient's SMS Reply.
However, if you manually contact single or multiple patients by means of SMS reminders, EXACT has no automatic means to link your sent SMS Reminder and the patient's SMS Reply with a pending appointment.
So, if you manually create SMS Reminders, EXACT will always send the consequent SMS Replies to the Manage Replies List and to the SMS Replies Tab, for you to manually confirm who this SMS is from, what it relates to, and what actions to take.