NexHealth Support

The Reminder template reduces phone calls by automating appointment confirmations and cancelations, and automatically sending necessary forms to your patients. This lowers your no-show rate, and provides vital information to patients about their care.

Best practices for sending Reminders:

1. Be sensitive to patients' preferences. Many patients do not appreciate receiving too many reminders. Avoid over-messaging your patients.

2. Consider whether your population prefers SMS messages or emails, and choose one or the other for one or more of the sequences.

3. Include your cancellation policy in email Reminders. Call attention to it by using bold, bright text.

4. Keep your message concise. Patients will not read long messages, especially in a text.

5. Allow patients to cancel and reschedule right from the Reminder to streamline the experience for you and them!

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Setting up your Reminders:

By default, NexHealth Reminders send patients an email and SMS message about their appointment one week, two days, and two hours before they are scheduled to come in.

Reminders contain the APPOINTMENT_REGISTRATION Smart Command, which determines what is included when the Reminder is sent to patients.

First, patients receive a message asking them to confirm or cancel (if enabled) their appointment.

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Then, if Smart Form rules have been configured, they will be prompted to complete any outstanding forms. If they Confirm their appointment but do not complete their forms, subsequent reminders will only include the form reminder. If they confirm and complete forms, they will not receive any Reminder unless the sequence is set to send to Confirmed and Unconfirmed patients (see instructions below).

Access Reminders

Your reminders can always be accessed from the Templates tab.

1. Navigate to  NexHealth Home

2. Select Templates or Reminders.

3. Click Reminders. This will open your Reminders sequence. Here, you will see gray tiles indicating when the messages are sent, with purple message tiles beneath to denote the messages.

Edit Reminders

NexHealth templates are fully customizable in your editor.

1. To edit the messages, hover over the right corner of the message tile and click on the pencil to edit on any of the message tiles to edit the copy.

2. When editing the text of your reminders, be sure to leave in the APPOINTMENT_REGISTRATION (or INSERTCONFIRMAPPT) smart command if you want to allow patients to confirm their appointments from that message. If you have Smart Form Automation configured, the appropriate forms will automatically send to the patient.

Optionally, you can add forms by going to Forms under Smart Commands and selecting the one(s) you want to include.

3. When editing the text of your reminders, be sure to leave in the APPOINTMENT_REGISTRATION (or INSERTCONFIRMAPPT) smart command if you want to allow patients to confirm their appointments from that message. If you have Smart Form Automation configured, the appropriate forms will automatically send to the patient.

Optionally, you can add forms by going to Forms under Smart Commands and selecting the one(s) you need.

4. Click Preview to see the message from the patient perspective.

5. Click Save and exit to save the changes.

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Add more Reminder messages in a sequence

1. To add additional triggers to send more messages to the patient, click the plus icon in the sequence.

2. Select Add new action and enter when you would like the message to send: ex: Send messages before 1 day--this will send a reminder to patients the day before their appointment.

Send reminders by patient confirmation statuses

You can set separate messaging for patients based on their confirmation status (ex: only sending day-of reminders to patients who have confirmed or adding a disclaimer about your no-show policy for patients who have not confirmed.)

1. Select +Add additional sequence.

2. This will open the action window. Choose:

• Send if confirmed: to send a message specifically for patients who have already confirmed their appointment.
• Send if unconfirmed: to send a message specifically for patients who have not yet confirmed their appointment. This will work for appointments confirmed with NexHealth, or patients confirmed in your health record system
• Send if confirmed or unconfirmed: to send the same message to patients regardless of their confirmation status.

*NOTE: With the APPOINTMENT_REGISTRATION smart command, if you want patients who have already confirmed their appointments to still get a reminder, you will need to set the action to Send if confirmed or unconfirmed.

3. If you wish to have separate messages based on confirmation status (for example, reminding unconfirmed practices of your cancellation policy), you will see a fork in the sequence, as seen below. You can then edit the messages independently.