Accurx Appointment Reminders is a paid-for feature in a premium set of features. Learn more about Accurx paid-for features, including how to get access here.
What are appointment reminders? ⏰
Appointment reminders are text messages that are automatically sent to patients to remind them about their upcoming appointments.
Face-to-face appointment reminders will include the date and time of the patient's appointment and, if your organisation has more than one site, the location of the appointment.
Telephone appointment reminders will include the date and a time for when the call may take place.
You can choose how patients will see the appointment time.
You can choose from:
Exact time – Displays the specific appointment time to the patient.
Two-hour window – Displays a time window starting 1 hour before and ending 1 hour after the appointment start time.
Time windows - Displays a time window of 8:00 to 13:00 and 13:00 to 18:30.
Entire Day - Displays a time window of 8:00 to 18:30.
☎️ Telephone appointment reminders will include the date and the time of the patient's appointment. (The time will depend on how you have chosen to display the appointment time to patients)
🩺 Face-to-Face appointment reminders will include the date and time of the patient's appointment and, if your organisation has more than one site, the location of the appointment. (The time will depend on how you have chosen to display the appointment time to patients)
How do Accurx appointment reminders work? 💬
Once you have access to this functionality, you can choose which specific slot types in your appointment book should receive automated appointment reminder text messages. (You will be able to do this under the Settings page.)
Once the slot types are chosen, Accurx will search the appointment book for those specific slot types and automatically send text messages to patients booked into them. The automatic text messages are sent to patients 1 working day before their appointment and can be set up to be sent 3 days and/or 7 working days before.
(Note: if the appointment is set up less than 1 working day before the appointment, the appointment reminder will be sent straight away if this is picked up in time)
You can set up different reminder messages for different slot types. For example, a Baby Imms slot type can have a tailored message to remind patients about bringing the red book and a Blood Test slot type could also have a message to ask patients to bring blood forms.
You can also choose how patients can manage their appointments if they can no longer make it. You can give the patient the option to cancel their appointment (this is on by default), where the appointment is automatically cancelled from the appointment book in EMIS/SystmOne.
If you do not want to allow patients to cancel their appointments automatically, you can instead give them the option to request to cancel or request to rebook.
These requests will be added to the inbox for manual action. You can read more about appointment amendments here.
You can also control how far in advance patients can cancel their appointments.
Some features we're not currently working on but may in future:
Sending a confirmation text when an appointment is booked directly via the EPR appointment book by a user
Allow patients to rebook their appointments from the reminder message.
Note: Only users who have admin access will be able to create and amend appointment reminders. Find out how to make other users admins here.
Appointment Reminders via the NHS App (Primary Care)
All appointment reminders will now go via the NHS App (For primary care organisations).
The fallback time for NHS app messages is 24 hours (or 3 hours for the 24-hour reminder message). If the patient does not read the message in their NHS App within this timeframe, an SMS message will be sent to them.
Note: an SMS will be sent automatically instead of using the NHS app if the patient does not have the app installed or has notifications turned off.
How do we pull patient mobile numbers?
We fetch the mobile number stored in the EPR (Electronic Patient Record - EMIS, SystmOne, Vision, etc) and confirm if the patient consented to receiving SMS text messages. If no number is stored, the reminder will not be sent. Patients with a declined consent code in their records will not receive reminders.
What setup is required? ⚙️
Not much! You will be able to set up appointment reminders shortly after getting access. We do not need to set up a gateway PC (one that needs to be switched on all the time).
Some things to think about:
You will need to switch off any other systems that send automatic reminder text messages to patients 1 working day before their appointments.
The Accurx appointment reminder system is entirely dependent on slot types, so you'll need to make sure your appointment book is set up for this. We do not currently read other appointment details such as location, clinician, session, rota type, slot type settings or slot flags.
Once you have this functionality switched on, you can get started following this step-by-step guide, or you can learn more by watching this video. 📹
What about sending other messages in bulk?
Accurx also offers Batch Messaging software that can send the same text message to an unlimited number of patients. This includes attaching SNOMED codes or documents to your text message, or collecting structured information from a group of patients by sending questionnaires to them all at once! Find out more about Accurx Batch Messaging here.
If you still have any questions or concerns, feel free to chat with us using the green message bubble in the bottom right-hand corner of this page. 👉