Sometimes you may want to SMS a patient their upcoming appointment well in advance. This helps patients plan themselves, making it more likely that they will attend their future appointment.
Note that this is a separate SMS from the appointment reminder SMSes which is typically only a day or two before their appointment. That is of course good for confirming their attendance but may be too late if they've forgotten about a trip or other plans they have made over the course of weeks/months since you last spoke.
For example, after you finish billing a patient you book them to come back in 2 months for a review. You send them an SMS, and as they walk out the door they get the reminder on their phones, and can easily put it in their personal calendar.
This feature was added in 2018 R2 and works as follows.
Setup
Enable the following setting:
File Menu >> General Options >> SMS Patient Next Appointment
Usage
When you create/move/edit/delete or finish an appointment such that the next appointment changes you will be prompted with the following message:
At this point you may be prompted to login to the SMS system. Just click Login and then OK if it comes up. This only happens once per Medilink session.
You are then taken to the Send Simple SMS screen. This allows you to modify the message if you wish. When you are happy with it, click Send.
Reporting
The report for these messages is under the SMS taskbar notification icon. Right-click it and go to Review Simple SMSes.
As you can see, patients can technically reply to these messages, but they won't be associated with the appointment in any way (unlike the SMS Reminders). We don't recommend encouraging the patients to reply to these - they should call if they want to change their appointment etc.
