Sending appointment reminders by SMS and Email will improve your patients' awareness of their upcoming appointments and reduce missed appointments.

⚠️Note: Email or SMS must be configured to enable this configuration in your system.

Configuring SMS and email automatic appointment reminders

💡Tip: Send your appointment reminders at least 24 hours before an appointment to give your patients enough time to make any appropriate arrangements to attend their appointment.

The automation configuration allows for three sending options.

1. Go to Configure - Automatic Appointment Messages.
2. Select the Reminders tab at the top of the window.
   
3. You can set up to three 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.
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.
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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: Check the merge fields used by your templates to ensure your reminder messages contain the right information.
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.

💡Tip: Increase the number of characters allowed for an SMS template to allow for the extra appointment information to be displayed on your patients devices.

🔗 Creating/Editing SMS Templates

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.

Additional information

⚠️Note: Reminders configured to send on the same day as the appointment will fail to send, EXACT requires a minimum of 24 hours before any appointment to send Email or SMS reminders.

💡Tip: To disable your automatic reminders, go to Configure - Automatic Appointment Reminders, then select the Reminders tab, remove all ticks from the Send Message 1, 2, 3 boxes - before doing this, take note of your existing settings so you can reinstate them again. Don't forget to click OK to save your changes.