Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Appointment reminders

If this has been discussed forgive me but a search didn't turn up anything.

The "Print Appointment Reminders" check box when making or checking a patient's appointment would seem to be handy. This would obviate the front desk repetitive task of filling out a little reminder card by hand to give each patient as they check out.

Problem is the one click prints practice name and next appointment date on one full sized sheet of paper. Wouldn't take many appointments to cover a whole refrigerator door.

How to use this with reasonable size print out?

Resize? Card printer? Label printer?

Agreed. We quit using that feature and went back to the old way of writing it on appt. cards. Plus, it crashes on us at times and cuts off the appointment time unless we exported it to .pdf or .doc file. It seems the margins are pre-set for some type of card

It would be nice if there was a way to hook the scheduler up with some sort of appt reminder phone calls!

Ketan, I agree. I wish we could do that too. My staff calls patients the day before (it keeps our no show rate to less than 1-2%). Before we implemented the "day before reminder" we had about 10-20% no shows. Needless to say, this is one of my staff's most important daily duties.

We use a reminder email and its quite effective. We use Appointment Quest for the schedule, which does the email automatically 48 hours before the appointment. We download the AQ schedule to AC every morning.

Since AC doesn't allow to make appointment reminders phone calls, I was thinking about entering patients' phone numbers into some reminder software and let computer make these calls.
Reminder emails are good, but most of elderly patients have no access to internet. Office staff could make appointment reminder calls, but patients usually start asking questions, turning short appointment calls into lengthy conversations.
I found these services for appointment reminders:
http://www.twilio.com/
http://www.outlookreminder.com/
https://www.appointmentreminder.org/
I am not sure which one is te best to use.

Well, we do have a young, educated population here. And only about 3 people that say that they don't have access to email.

For automated appointment reminders, you might want to check out Q Reviews. They offer features that can help with phone reminders and improve patient follow-ups. Give it a try!

Amazing Reminders interfaces with AC/ACPM, unless they're no longer selling it. Updox also has a reminders program.

Amazing Reminders works pretty well for us and you can see if they confirm or not. It syncs with your calendar, so no copy and paste, printing out schedules. We do print out the schedules for the week in the event of a power failure/no AC we can still contact patients although that would reveal your cell phone. Maybe we should get a burner phone! Couple of issues I encounter is with my aging population especially with those with ADHD, they don't always look at their phone and show up saying, "I didn't know I had an appointment until 9am this morning!" That is the 2 hour reminder in addition to the 2 day reminder and if I was dumb enough to schedule a 65 yo patient with ADHD and normal forgetting to a 9:00 or 9:30 appt, I wind up having to call them on the phone and do telemed. I put a label on my monitor about this. When CoVid hit I was fortunate enough to be a psychiatrist and telemed was easy for me and I got in the habit of making my own followup appointments. Still do for the vast majority. I also send emails of medication changes done in my office (e.g. switching from one antidepressant to another using a cross-taper) and I ask, "Do you look at your emails?" and 1 out of 5 will say, "yeah, about once a year." I discovered a great app called Phone Link by Microsoft that mirrors your phone to the PC and several of my long-standing patients have my phone number anyway and can send info that way. With Updox you can send a text but it's using the old Twitter limit of 140 characters. You can always send two or more texts to protect your cell phone's identity. I will use the text with fill in appointment reminders for those I am seeing who have other appointments with providers, dentists, PT, etc if they don't have their paper calendar or phone with them.

I have tried both Updox Reminders and Amazing Reminders. Updox can do more but I prefer Amazing because it automatically confirms the appt in AC. With Updox you see the confirmed appts in Updox only and you have to manually confirm them in AC.

Serene,

No problems with patient's getting calls at all hours of the day and night?

How long have you been on AC Reminders? we used it about 8-10 years ago and just didn't see the benefit vs cost.

Hi Chris,
No, AC reminders block night time calls/txt. You can set the hours that reminders are sent out.
I've been using for 2 years I think. It does cost a lot. But with manual texting there's a lot of room for errors. Manually calling is fine but we just don't have the manpower to do it more than the day before. (I send automatic reminders 3 days before because we want to see openings in the schedule more than just 1 day before.)

Not trying to promote other EMRs, but first, we pay $75.00 for text reminders. I always look at these things like if you save one or two no shows it was worth it. But if you definitely do payment text reminders and pay for them, when another EMR includes it, you can deduct that from the price and it makes it more affordable.