Configuring SMS Reply Behaviour

Before you begin

  • The Waiting Room: Patients cannot reply to SMS messages sent from the Waiting Room.
  • The Appointment Book: From the Appointment Book you can send SMS messages to individual patients, or to multiple patients simultaneously. Because these SMS messages are being sent from the Appointment Book, it is assumed that the messages relate to the patients' appointments. When sending bulk SMS appointment reminders, in order to allow patients to confirm or reject their attendance at a scheduled appointment, Pracsoft accepts SMS replies from your patients, and then interprets-and-acts-upon those replies. For example, if a patient replies "No" to your appointment reminder, Pracsoft can be configured to automatically remove their appointment from the Appointment Book. The following information relates to configuring Pracsoft's acceptance of, and interpretation of, SMS reply messages sent by your patients.

Procedure

  1. Within the Appointment Book, select SMS > Message Templates > Configure SMS Reply Behaviour. The Configure SMS Reply Behaviour window appears.
  2. This window is divided into three configurable sections;
    • Confirmation: When patients reply to confirm their attendance, typically they reply with either "Yes", or simply "Y". This section allows you to specify additional acceptable responses, such as "Ok". Confirmation of attendance is displayed in the Appointment Book with the

      icon. See Status Legend for more information.
    • Cancellation: When patients reply to indicate they do not plan to attend, typically they reply with either "No", or simply "N". This section allows you to specify additional acceptable responses, such as "Nope". Furthermore, this section allows you to instruct Pracsoft to perform an action upon the patient's scheduled appointment (such as deleting it) when such a reply is received, and to record a comment against the deletion. See History of Deleted Appointments for more information about deleted appointments. When a patient declines their appointment, this is displayed in the Appointment Book with the

      icon (provided of course that the appointment was not automatically deleted upon receiving the patient's response). See Status Legend for more information.
    • Opt out: Patients also have the ability to inform you that they no longer want to receive SMS messages from your practice. Typically, they reply "Stop". This section allows you to specify additional acceptable responses, such as "S" or "Unsubscribe". When Pracsoft receives such a reply, it will automatically flag the patient's record to indicate that they no longer want to receive SMS messages.
      If a reply cannot be interpreted by the system, this is indicated against the appointment, with the

      icon. This may occur if;

      The patient replied with something other than one of the accepted responses e.g. "yrs". If you receive these sorts of replies, you might consider adding them to the additional alternate replies section.

      The patient replies more than once, with conflicting responses e.g. replying "Y" and then "N".

  3. Make modifications to these sections as desired. If you want to add reply terms, ensure you separate each with a comma. Note that these reply terms are not case-sensitive e.g. if you add "yep", a patient can reply with "Yep", and it was be interpreted correctly.
  4. Click Save to confirm.

Results