Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Appointment reminders - AC? Updox?

We are pretty happy with the appointment reminder system we are using now, but in an effort to improve our no-show rate, and to optimize data flow, we are looking into alternatives.
The last post I saw about Updox reminders was about two years ago and there were some issues, but the CEO of Updox came on and indicated that some changes were being made. Can anyone give some info about how the Updox appointment reminder service is working now?

How about AC's service, Amazing Reminders? Any feedback?

The Amazing Charts Reminders service works great. It has greatly helped with no shows although some people just don't get it and will not show up even if we speak with them the morning of their appointment. Well worth the monthly fee.

The AC reminders does not behave well with Updox calendars.

If patient confirms appointment thru portal, it does not show up in AC (like it used to before the ACReminders product was installed).

If a patient confirms via the ACReminders product, it does not show a green dot in the Updox calendar.

I am not having success with neither AC nor Updox support.

I will probably turn off the reminder service shortly.

I thought I would share this and save some others the hassle. It came from AC product manager.

I still don't understand how a confirmation coming the AC reminders product should be programmatically different than a manual confirmation using the AC GUI which used to sync with the Updox calendar, or a confirmation from the updox portal which used to sync with the AC database calendar. I dont understand why AC reminders needs to communicate with updox? This seems so lame to me.

Chris Conrad via amazingcharts.onmicrosoft.com
12:34 PM (14 minutes ago)

to me
Hi Al

I reviewed the case notes. Amazing Reminders is integrated with AC to confirm appointments. Updox scheduling access the appointment in our database but they do so independent of any integration from our end and Updox doesn?t recognize the existence of Amazing Reminders so the two applications will never be able to communicate with each other. Honestly this question has never been brought to my attention so I had to do a little digging into the cause myself. I?m sorry but due to the low demand at this time I don?t believe this is a feature that we could consider enhancing. We do update the appts in AC with a flag saying they are confirmed, and Updox has access to that flag so it may be something they could do on their end. Have you mentioned anything to them yet about this?

Regards

Chris

I've been using Updox reminders for a few months now. It seems to work as intended but I have not seen any improvement in no-shows over my staff just calling the day before. One problem is the reminder comes up as an Ohio number so a lot of patients assume it is baloney and don't answer. We contacted Updox to see if there is a work-around and they never got back to us.

The staff likes it since it takes some of the burden off of them but otherwise I don't see a big advantage so far.

I have been using Updox reminders for a couple of months, and while we initially didn't see a benefit (other than time saved from staff making phone calls, which by itself is worth it, imo), over time I have seen a drop in my no-show/same day cancel from from ~16% to ~11%.

The only problem I have is that there is a bug in the system and any reminder preference set in Updox gets overwritten to "system default" if any change at all is made in the demographics section of AC.

I have decided to continue having my lovely receptionist call them. They like hearing her voice. They also sometimes need to change the appointment, so she can encourage a 'reschedule' instead of a cancel. She does not mind being paid for 20 minutes of her time. I do not mind paying for that extra human touch. It tells the patients we are not too busy to call them personally.

Randy, you can have Updox change that so that the caller ID is the number to your office.

Thanks ND, we will call Updox again.