Accurx Appointment Reminders is part of Accurx Plus - a premium tier of Accurx Desktop. Learn more about Accurx Plus, including how to get access here.
Accurx Appointment Reminders allows you to set up automated messages to be sent to patients to remind them about their upcoming appointments. You can get an overview of how the product works here first if you'd like!
Accessing Appointment Reminders
From your Accurx toolbar, click on your initials, select "Manage Organisation" and scroll down to Appointment Reminders and click "New reminder"
Setting up a new Reminder
📹 If you'd prefer to watch a video 👉 click here
You'll see a screen that allows you to choose which slot types you'd like to send automatic appointment reminders for and add in your own messaging to the reminder if you'd like.
👉 If you see an option to add "Site locations", take a look at this guide here
1) Choose which slots your reminder should apply to
Click "Select your slot types" and you will see a dropdown of slot types. These are pulled directly from your appointment book. You can select as many slots as you'd like! 😁
⚠️ Note: make sure any slot types selected are for appointments that can always have a reminder message no matter where the slot is in the appointment book.
For SystmOne organisations with Shared Admin - if you can access the appointment books of other separate orgs and you don't want to set up appointment reminders for those orgs, you will need to ensure that you do not use the same slot types as those other organisations.⚠️
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2) If appropriate, edit part of the text message that is sent to the patients
Part of the text is uneditable (the part in light grey) since this will automatically populate the date and time of the unique appointment for a patient.
You also won't be able to edit the instructions for how the patient can cancel. A unique link that a patient can use to cancel their appointment will be autogenerated here.
Where it says "Enter an additional optional message", you can add text if you'd like. For example, you could add in information about your arrival policy.
💡 Tip: You can set up separate reminders for different slot types and add in custom messages here. For example, if you have a specific slot type for therapy sessions, you can set up a specific appointment reminder for this slot type and add in a message to remind them to bring their red book. You can set up as many specific reminder messages as you'd like! 💡
Remember that every patient who has an appointment of the selected slot type(s) will be sent the same message so do keep the content relatively generic.
Once you're ready to do, click "Set live" and your reminder will start to send to patients who are booked into the slot types selected! 🎉
Your reminder will run in the background and keep sending to all patients booked into the specific slot types until you delete the reminder.
Editing or Deleting the Reminder
If you'd like to stop a reminder from sending or edit the reminder, find the Reminder from your "Manage reminders" dashboard, and click "Edit"
If you would like to delete the reminder, you can click "Delete".
When do appointment reminders send?
24 working hours before the patient's appointment (e.g. if the patient's appointment is on Tuesday at 10:30am, they will receive their appointment reminder on Monday at 10:30am.)
(Note: if the appointment is set up less than 1 working day before the appointment, the appointment reminder will be sent straight away)
We also have a feature for appointment reminders to be sent 1 week before if the option is selected. This is unchecked at initial set-up and will need to be manually clicked to be instated. 😊
Please note: If a patient is booked into an appointment within 24 hours of the appointment time, a reminder will be sent to a patient if the reminder has already been set up in Accurx. We search the appointment book for newly booked appointments around once an hour 👍
Can I test the system myself first?
Yes! You can do so by creating a test slot in your appointment book and booking in a test patient that has your own mobile number registered. If you'd like to test the appointment reminder system in this way, do the following things:
Create a test patient with an NHS number and mobile number (ideally your mobile number). If you don't have a test patient with an NHS number, you can use this tool to generate one and add it to your test patient.
Create a test slot type that doesn't have other real patients booked into it
Add the test slot into your appointment book for tomorrow and book the test patient into it
Set up your test appointment reminder following the steps above.
You should receive your test appointment reminder text message around 24 hours before the test patient's appointment. It may take a bit of time for the system to pick up the appointment. Please allow at least 1/1.5 hours after setting up the appointment reminder to receive the test text if the appointment is sooner than 24 hours away.
How do we pull patient mobile numbers?
We fetch the mobile number stored in the EPR (Electronic Patient Record - aka. EMIS, Systm1, Vision etc).
For more information - please see our article here.