Home Forums Discussions Problems appointment reminders

I see in AC that there is a little space for email address in the patient's demographics. Has anyone tried to use this feature to email patients 1-2 days before their appointment to remind them?

I tried it but it uses outlook and I can't figure out how to modify the emails so it will state on there "Do not reply to this e-mail. E-mails to this address are not returned".

Thanks for all your help

I don't think it even made it onto the "final development poll" but the ability to actually use email from within AC would be a real asset. As it stands now, I find it to be essentially useless. For example, if we could configure Updox to be the default email agent rather than Outlook, a significant number of options would immediately be available, including the one you mention.

Let me expand tvo's question a little, if I may. Could anyone explain how they use the email function in AC?

We use the email function in AC to remind patient's of their appointments, inform them of lab test results and answer questions.
First of all let me say that there have been discussions on this board previously about encryption, HIPPA etc. We do not use encryption but do have the patients sign a consent for email communication ( for patients who do not use email or who do not consent we put our office email into their email address box so that any email inadvertantly sent to them comes back to us).
For appointment reminders you go to the schedule of the day you are reminding for, highlight the name on the schedule, rightclick,drop down to the email and insert the message, my staff has a template on their desktop that they paste into the message box that gives the patient the day,date,time of their appointment and asks them to bring a medication list, photo ID etc. It also asks them to respond telling us if they intend or do not intend to keep the appointment.
We also send them messages about their test results and ask for a response in order to confirm that they received the information ( we use the results pending file and do not push the item to the completed orders section until the patient has been informed). When we receive their response then we take it out of the results pending file. This eliminates the possibility that the patient missed the message from us.) For sensitive stuff or stuff that needs prompt attention we use the telephone.
We encourage the patients to email us with questions/problems. We copy and paste the message in Yahoo to a message attached to their chart, I respond using outlook in AC and send the AC message back to the front desk. When the front desk receives the patient's response they copy and paste it into the AC message and send it back to me and so forth. Basically the front desk is acting as the patient's intermediary putting the messages into AC and I can respond to them from AC. When the exchange is complete we save the whol conversation to the chart.
We have a few patients who are frequent emailers, but really not very many.

Thanks Dk for the reply
1. I just want to use the email just to remind patients of appointments. Hopefully, hope this is HIPPA compliant and I don't have to to have patients sign a form saying they allow me to remind them of their appointment by email.

Does it use outlook as default? How do you set it up so if you don't want them emailing back, you can put a statement in saying do not reply to this email, emails will not be returned.


Thank you so much DK

Amazing Charts uses Outlook as the "default" I guess. I was told that it cannot be switched to something else.
We ask the patients to inform us whether they will be keeping their appointment so that we have an accurate or realistic schedule.
You could always ask them to telephone you if they will not be able to keep the appointment.
We like the email communication because it can be checked periodically. The telephone has to be answered immediately and disrupts workflow more than email.

Has anyone found a way to automatically send email or text appointment reminders. There are some outside vendors but none that work with ac that I know of. This would really make reminders easy.

Deborah does your staff type in apt date and time into the template for each patient or does ac do it for you with your template somehow?