We ran into the Home (landline) vs Cell problem twice. But, of course, 14 years ago a lot less four-year-olds had a smart phone (actually I mean people in general). We got lucky lately because most people give us their cell phone, and is has to be in the home field of both medware and AC to show up. Unfortunately, our demographics sheet for patients always says Home ___ then Cell ___. And, people still have landlines.
We use 1800notify.com for sending our texts. Amazing web interface and support is always Melinda. I think she may be the only one who answers the phone. Anyway, you pick a date in the Medware scheduler and load an Excel that it documents and choose when to send out the reminders. Out of 20, maybe 2 will be landlines and will be yellowed out.
With out blast texts, we queried not seen after 48 months and not inactive. This can be exported to a cell sheet. Emailed it to Melinda and clicked on the result. We got 1709 patients of which about 75 had errors. We made an Excel sheet and entered about 100 cell prefixes from the good ones, then used a couple of scripts to put them in order and delete the duplicates. So, we had a list of 50 good cell phone prefixes.
We went through all 75 and using AC (moving a cell phone number if there to the home field) and into Medware looking and fixing any ones we could. We ran it again and we were down to about 45 still not working. So, we wrote the text messages and sent the new Excel sheet and the message to Melinda. Along with the text message, we had a link they could click which went to a document (you are welcome to look at it -- I edited it like 20 times) on a website. She sent the text at 11:00 am and almost all were successful. We sent the document as a letter to the 45 without addresses and the few that didn't work. (their carrier verifies it hit their phone). So, I would say around 1675 got the message. It was funny. We had six people come in that day for regular appointments, and all of them had it on their phones.We also corrected a lot of cell phone numbers in the process. We now ask specifically for their cell phone. As you know. Everyone checks their text messages. You can have it call or email them. The funny thing was. In all those texts only two opted out. You would have to think at least five would have transferred and hadn't been inactivated.
