Patchs appointment reminders can be used to remind patients when they have an upcoming appointment at your practice. The appointment reminders work for all appointments in your clinical system, not just those booked via Patchs.
Patients will receive a reminder 24 hours before their appointment, using their contact information on the Personal Demographics Service (PDS).
For appointment reminders, Patchs users can now use a button to update clinic & slot types, management of cancelled appointments and reminder delivery method.
Post appointment messages can be used to automatically send patients the Friends and Family Test after appointments. To use this feature you will need to enable appointment reminders.
Enabling appointment reminders and messages for SystmOne Practices
You can enable appointment reminders from your feature settings page by ticking the Appointment Reminders box, which will create the Appointment reminders and messages tab.
Enabling appointment reminders for EMIS Practices
As an EMIS practice who want to use Patchs to send Appointment Reminders you will need to let us know first. Navigate to your Feature Settings page and click on the bottom button to make the request:
(If you cannot see the 'Request to enable appointment reminders' button, please contact the Advanced Team on: 0330 303 1274 or submit a request to the Advanced Customer Support Portal )
After you have made the request you will see this message explaining the status of your request:
Before appointment reminders can be enabled for your practice, EMIS will contact you and ask you to activate an Appointment Reminder Data Extraction Agreement.
Once you have done this and your appointment reminder data is available to Patchs you can enable Appointment Reminders from the feature settings page:
- Tick the Appointment reminders box to create the Appointment reminders and messages tab where you can configure your Appointment Reminder settings
Add a new appointment reminder and/or post-appointment message
From the Appointment reminders and messages tab, select Update Clinic and Slots to show the most up-to-date clinics and slots at your practice.
And then select Add new reminder and/or message.
And then complete the following sections as appropriate.
Choose the clinic and/or slot you want to set reminders or post appointment messages for
Send reminders
You can edit the appointment reminder message text but should not delete [date], [time], [cancel link]* and [unsubscribe link].
*Please note that the [cancel link] is only currently available for SystmOne appointment reminders.
You can include [patient name] to automatically fill the patient name.
Send post appointment message
You can then chose to send the reminders and/or message via email, SMS or both:
Once you have set your appointment reminder and/or message, click Save to confirm.
Enabling appointment reminders
When appointment reminders are enabled for a particular clinic type patients will be sent a reminder 24 hours before their appointment using their contact information on the Personal Demographics Service (PDS).
When post-appointment reminders are enabled for a particular clinic type patients will be sent a message two hours after their appointment using their contact information on the Personal Demographics Service (PDS) .
Patients may not have consented to receiving appointment reminders or post-appointment messages, though they can unsubscribe.
Patients will not receive reminders or post-appointment messages if there are no valid contact details on the PDS or they have unsubscribed from reminders.
- Email Enabled
- When email is enabled patients will receive their appointment reminder by email
- SMS enabled (visible at practices with Patchs SMS)
- When SMS is enabled patients will receive their appointment reminder by SMS
Edit appointment reminder settings
To change the appointment reminder and/or messaging settings for a particular clinic type, you should click on Edit the link at the bottom of the panel.
You can edit:
- Whether or not the reminders are enabled
-
The reminder message text
- Whether or not the post-appointment messages are enabled
- The post-appointment message text
- Whether the reminder and/or post-appointment message should be sent via email and/or SMS
To change the clinic or slot type please add a new reminder.
What patients see
Appointment reminders
Patients receive an SMS and/or email reminder (dependent on how you configure the reminders) about their appointment 24 hours beforehand. This includes a link to cancel the appointment and an option to opt out of future reminders and messages.
Post-appointment FFT message
Patients receive an SMS and/or email message (dependent on how you configure the messages) asking for their feedback, 2 hours after their appointment. This includes a link to the friends and family test and an option to opt out of future reminders and messages.
Cancelling an appointment
Unsubscribing from appointment reminders
EMIS troubleshooting
If you are experiencing issues with EMIS appointment reminders, please try the following:
Deactivate and reactivate Patchs from the partner API list
- Go to EMIS Ball > System Tools > EMAS Manager > Partner API tab (bottom left of screen)
- Select Patchs from the partner API list on the left-hand side (it should have a green tick next to it)
- Select "Deactivate Application" at the top left
- Then select "Activate Application" at the top left again
This will reset Patchs and re-activate the API calls as some had become deactivated.
Ensure all users are correctly enabled
- Go to EMIS Ball > System Tools > EMAS Manager > Partner API tab (bottom left of screen)
- Select Patchs from the partner API list down the left-hand side (it should have a green tick next to it)
- Select "Login Access" along the top
- Select the user(s) you want to give access to and tick the boxes "Allow Login" and "Auto Login"
- Select OK
- The user should log out of EMIS and log back in for these changes to take effect
Automatically save appointment reminders & post-appointment messages to clinical system*
*This feature is currently only available to pilot practices.
When a patient has been sent an appointment reminder or a post-appointment message, turning this feature on will automatically save a record of this into the clinical system.
Via a new user interface, it will also allow you to more easily audit which appointment reminders and post-appointment messages have and haven't been sent, and which have been saved to the clinical system. There is a more detailed explanation of what the green and red icons mean further down this page.
When this feature is enabled, you will see an extra question when you are setting up an appointment reminder message or a post-appointment message, asking you whether you would like to save the reminder or message to the clinical system.
You can choose either 'Yes' or 'No'.
When 'Yes' is selected, Patchs will save a record of the appointment reminder or post-appointment message to the clinical system whenever the reminder or message is sent.
For example, those practices using SystmOne will see something like this:
- Appointment reminder:
- Post-appointment message:
And those practices using EMIS will see
- Appointment reminder:
- Post-appointment message:
Monitoring your appointment reminders and post-appointment messages
From the 'Appointment reminders sent' and 'Post appointment messages sent' tabs at the top of the page, you can filter by date range, patient name, NHS number, site, clinic type and slot type:
There are a range of icons to help you to monitor the status of any appointment reminders or post-appointment messages you have sent, whether by email or SMS.
1. A green tick on the left means that the reminder/message has been successfully received by the patient:
2. A green tick on the right means that the reminder/message has successfully been saved to the patient record in the clinical system:
3. If you see a red exclamation mark, it means that the email/SMS has not been delivered to the patient:
4. If you see a grey clock icon, it means that the message has not yet been saved to the clinical system.
If this happens, you can click on the blue button in the top right-hand corner of the page to retry saving to the clinical system.