Auditing Appointment Reminder Delivery

Below are steps you can take to audit the delivery of your appointment reminders if you believe a reminder was not delivered as expected. Use the guide below to find the scenario that best matches your inquiry and follow the step guide.

A reminder was delivered for a canceled appointment or an appointment that doesn’t exist

1. Make sure the appointment was canceled properly in the PM system. The system will not detect if an appointment is deleted or rescheduled using copy/paste or drag/drop methods. An appointment status must be set to canceled to be detected by the reminder system.
2. If an appointment was canceled correctly, check the modification history. If it was canceled within 24 hours of the appointment reminder sending, the system may not have had time to pick up the change before queueing that set of reminders.

A reminder was delivered with the wrong information (ex. time and date, location, provider, etc.)

1. This is usually because the appointment was modified within 24 hours of sending the reminder. Since our system caches appointment information every 24 hours, the reminder could still have the original information, and the next reminder will contain the modifications. Verify this by looking at the modification history in your PM system.

A patient says they did not receive a reminder

1. The first place you’ll want to check is the reminder dashboard. Set the timeframe for the day of the appointment. Click into the detail  of the Patients General Result graph (top right). Look up the patient and check the email, text, and voice icon colors. If they are…
   1. RED – The reminder was not sent. There are various reasons for this.
      1. Not the first appointment of the day.
      2. The patient doesn’t have an email or phone number in the PM system
      3. The appointment was created within 24 hours of the reminder delivery. (Our system caches appointment information every 24 hours so the appointment may not have been recognized until after that set of reminders was queued for delivery.)
      4. The provider, location, or appointment type may not be active for this reminder set. To verify go to Client Manager >> Marketing Onboarding > Notifications. Open the filter settings for locations, procedures, and providers  to check that the ones related to the appointment are on. (Remember if none of the checkboxes in a filter are checked, then the reminder is sent for everything. If at least one is checked, then the reminder is only sent for the checked boxes.)
      5. Check your PM system for communication preference settings. The reminders will respect contact preferences if they are set up.
   2. GOLD – The reminder was sent to the email/phone number in the PM System. You can see a time stamp by hovering your mouse over the icon. You can see the exact message by clicking on the icon. If the patient is insisting they didn’t receive it…
      1. Verify that the correct email/phone is listed in the PM system.
      2. For text reminders, verify that they have not accidentally blocked the number or opted out. You can check the opt-out report in your texting provider account.
      3. For email reminders, their inbox may be blocking the sender or delivered to the spam folder. Ask them to save admin@patientschedulingservices.com to their contacts.
   3. GREEN – The patient did receive the reminder and used it to confirm their appointment.

Confirmation statuses are not saving

1. Remember that reminders are only sent for the first appointment of the day so make sure they don’t have an earlier appointment that has been confirmed.
2. If a patient says they have confirmed, but the status is not updated in RSI, this is often a simple mistake. A patient may have tried to respond to their text or email by writing a message back instead of clicking the confirmation link.
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3. To verify if it’s a one-off patient mistake vs a larger issue, check your reminder dashboard for appointments on the same day. Click on the details  for the Patients Confirmed graph. If you see other patients confirming via voice, email, or text, this was likely a single-patient mistake. If you don’t see other confirmations, please respond to this email letting us know so we can look further.
4. If you see a confirmation status in RSI but not in your PM system, please respond to this email with a list of the appointments so we can investigate further. We will need the date, time, provider, and patient name.