Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Tickler File, Annual Exams

I am looking for your advice on this subject. Since using Amazing charts, we have relied on the timed reminders feature. When a patient has an annual exam, we send a reminder to pop up in a year to send them a letter about coming in for a physical. This is not the most efficient system, and results in a very full outbox. I am trying to set up a traditional tickler file. When someone has an annual, we give them a postcard, they fill out their address and it goes in the box to get mailed out next year. They have seen the card, so they will recognize it when it comes in the mail (and it is addressed in their own handwriting).

Now the problems is getting 1-2000 patients into the file. I've started by patients having birthdays over the next month - sending them a card now if due, and putting one in the file for next year. Patient birthdays are easy to search on AC.

I am wondering how this is done in other practices and if any of you use a fancy service that handles this. My dentist sends cards from a marketing company and my optometrist sends text messages on the phone. I am also interested in other methods to build compliance for preventive care and to market to my own patients.

We schedule patients for their next year CPE / Medicare wellness when they are checking out at their CPE / MWV visit. They get a card with date and time.
They used to get a reminder call 2 days before the visit, and now they have their appointments in their updox portal, which can be set to send them a reminder.
We still call patients who don't have emails, can't use updox.

We use AC advanced search with the criteria "birthday in next X weeks" set to 1. We have to do this once a week though. If you run this report on the same day each week, you won't get duplicate names from last week's report.

We also did not want to have to thousands of names to a tickler file so we've stuck to the AC search.

Do you call them each week and say they are due, or do you send them a reminder in the mail?

We call first. If we get someone on the phone, we will offer appointment. If there's no answer/disconnected or voicemail, we send a postcard. This week there's 27 people on the report, and I think it takes about 2-3 hours to call and do the postcards. (Thanks, Amazing Labels!) We do exclude anyone with an upcoming appointment though, which we can do in the report because we use AC for scheduling.

Thanks, I'd be interested in what others are doing in this regard, as well.

I wish in AC we can search for birthdays in January, February, etc.. for any year. That would be your monthly tickler file.