TextMailer: SMS and Email Appointment Reminders and Recall Messages
SurgerySoft Ltd, the team behind QOFcountdown, also supplies an SMS / Email appointment reminder (TextMailer-A) and recall (TextMailer-R) product for Vision practices.
TextMailer-A Introduction
TextMailer-A will text (and/or email) appointment reminders to patients who have an appointment booked on your Vision appointment system. It is fully configurable for how your practice works – see the Features section below.
The advantages of reminding patients of their forthcoming appointments are threefold:
- patients are more likely to remember and keep their appointment
- patients are more likely to cancel if unable to keep their appointment
- increased patient satisfaction
Traditionally some reminders have been made by phone or even by letter, but this is very time consuming and expensive.
More and more businesses from dentists to hairdressers are now taking advantage of the high proportion of mobile phone ownership and texting reminders to their patients and customers. This mode of communication has become increasingly acceptable and may now be considered the norm.
A number of companies are offering text appointment reminder programs. But even though texting is typically a lot cheaper than phoning patients, the annual cost can quickly mount up.
The alternative is to use the free NHSnet texting service, but this is very time consuming and prone to error as each mobile number and message has to be typed in individually.
Now, for the first time in a commercial product, SurgerySoft has combined the benefits of automated text reminders with free NHSnet texts to create TextMailer-A, a fully-featured text appointment reminder system with free messages and just a single low annual licence fee to pay, however many texts you send.
TextMailer-R Introduction
Now included for the same price is TextMailer-R, which uses the same technology to send SMS and/or email messages to patients from Vision Groups or QOFcountdown patient lists. This is useful for recalls, and may also be adapted for other purposes where you wish to send bulk messages to a group of patients.
Features
- Compatible with both LAN (local hosting) and VES (remote hosting)
- No charge for sending texts, since they are sent using the free service provided by NHSmail (England and Scotland only).
- Configurable to your practice:
- you can choose exactly which patients will receive a recall or reminder and how far in advance
- you can include or exclude individual clinicians, sessions, and appointment types
- the wording of messages sent is configurable
- you can use opt whether or not to use numbers recorded other than in the patient mobile field, e.g. in the home number field
- honours Read Code for opt out of SMS messaging
- can also send emails, if you have an email address recorded in Vision
- optionally, it will record in Vision journal that a message has been sent
- can be operated manually, or configured then run semi-automatically
- Compatible with multi-site practices sharing one Vision database, e.g. branch surgeries
- Full logging of messages sent, and also of patients with appointments for whom it did not send a message (e.g. no valid mobile number found)
- Utilities included to help you clean up your mobile numbers where they are invalid
- Test mode available, so you can test it by sending messages to yourself instead of to patients
Requirements
- Vision Appointments: Appointments must be made in the Vision Appointments module and not in any 3rd party appointments module
- NHSmail Account: TextMailer needs an NHSmail (@nhs.net) account to send free messages (these accounts are only available in England and Scotland). The manual explains how to obtain a suitable account if you don’t have one
- Microsoft Outlook: You must have Outlook on the workstation you wish to send messages from. The manual provides full instructions on how to configure Outlook