Reminders

This screen is to used to select and process reminders. For a general discussion of reminders, see Concepts|Reminders.

This is a standard select screen. In the first field, you can select what types of reminders to process, either All (as shown above) or a specific type chosen from the pull-down list. 

The From and To dates are used to enter the date range for which the reminders are due. By default (ie when you open the screen for the first time in a session), these will be set to the first and last days in the next calendar month.  Assuming you use a monthly reminder cycle, in the first week of each month you would use this screen to check and process all the reminders due in the next month.

The Customer Location can be used to filter reminders by a customer's preferred practice location, to support location specific content. Selecting:

• a practice location, returns reminders for customers that have the location set as their preferred location.
• None - selects all customers that don't have a preferred practice location
• All - returns reminders for all practice locations

Having set the reminder type (or All) and the dates, you press the Find button, and it will display all the reminders that have status 'In Progress' and:

• are new (ie have not yet been sent out) and have a due date between the specified from and to dates, ie from <= due <= to
• are too old and should be cancelled (ie their due date+ cancel interval < today)
• are overdue (ie have been sent out previously) and have a next due date between the specified from and to dates

The columns are as follows:
Due Date - the date the associated event (eg vaccination) is/was due
Next Due - the date that the reminder is due. For initial reminder (ie those with 'Reminders Sent'=0), this will be the same as the Due Date, for others it is the Due Date plus the Overdue interval specified for this sent count (ie Reminders Sent) in the Reminder Type definition.
Reminder Type - the name of the reminder type
Customer - the name of the customer. (In the above screen shot, these have been intentionally blurred.)
Patient - the name of the patient.
Reminders Sent - the number of reminders sent out previously. (Note that 'sent' does not just mean posted or emailed, it also includes those listed to be called.)
Last Sent - the date on which this reminder was previously sent out.
Error - will be blank unless there was an error processing this reminder, in which case the error message is displayed.
Action - will be one of the following:

• Post - the reminder will be printed and will have to be posted to the customer
• Email - the reminder will be emailed to the customer
• SMS - the reminder will be sent via SMS
• List - the details will be listed on the Patient Reminders Report (the standard version of this displays the customer and patient's names, but it is possible to modify the report to generate address labels)
• Export - the reminder will be included in the exported CSV file (see below)
• Cancel - the reminder will be cancelled because it is too old and has reached its cancellation date
• Skip - no processing will be done either because there is no template at all specified for the reminder type, or because there is no template with the current reminder count

The buttons are as follows:
Print - prints the selected reminder irrespective of the Action show. Note that an error will occur if there is no template specified - see also below.
Send All - initiates the processing of all the reminders found - ie 'Send All' means 'process all the reminders of the selected type that match date range' and NOT 'process all reminders of all types that match the date range'
Report - prints all the reminders found irrespective of the actions shown, ie print the reminders shown on the screen. This uses the document template with Type 'Reminder Report'.

 

Post, Email, SMS, List or Export?
The program decides whether to Post, Email, SMS, List or Export using the following logic:

• if the reminder type's template for the current reminder count has its List box ticked, then list; else
• if the reminder type's template for the current reminder count has its SMS box ticked, and the customer has a phone contact with 'Allow SMS' ticked, then SMS - but see also below; else
• if the customer has a contact with purpose 'Reminder', then
  • if this is a phone number, then
    • if the contact has Allow SMS ticked, then SMS - but see also below; else
    • list
  • if it is an email address, then email
  • if it is a location, then
    • if the reminder type's template has its Export box ticked, then export; else
    • post
• else if there is no contact with purpose 'Reminder', use the first contact found and treat as above

If there are multiple contacts with purpose 'Reminder' then the first one found will be used.  Hence it is best to only have one contact with purpose 'Reminder'.

 

Emailed Reminders

When reminders are emailed, the From address will be set to:

• the Reminder email contact associated with the customer's Practice Location; or
• the Practice's Reminder email contact, if the  customer doesn't have a Practice Location, or the Practice Location doesn't have a Reminder email contact; or
• the Practice's preferred email contact, if there is no Reminder email contact

 

SMS Reminders

Reminders will only be sent via SMS if:

• the Grouped Reminders template has its SMS field set; and
• individual reminder templates have their SMS field set

If a template's SMS field is empty, SMS reminders will be listed instead.

 

Location Specific Reminders

Location specific reminder content can be supported by:

• filtering by Customer Location, and using the appropriate letterhead
• examining the customer's location within reminder templates

 

Notes:

 

1. If you do process individual reminder types (ie do not select All), then you should also do a run with All specified to ensure that you pick up all the reminders for the period, and don't forget some types.
    
2. The Reminder Report document template is used both for the Send All processing (to show the reminders with Action 'List', and  also if you click the Report button.   However, you can make the system switch templates by changing the selected Practice Location to a one that has a document template of type Reminder Report specified.  Hence if you create a dummy Program Location called say "Reminders Labels" and you have two document templates of type Reminder Report ,one of which generates a standard list (like the standard Patient Reminder Report), and the other which generates labels called say "Reminder Labels", and you set this as a template used by the location "Reminder Labels", then if you switch to this location and then use Send All, all the reminders with Action 'List' will appear as a set of labels.
    
3. Errors. If you get an error saying "... no document template for .. with a reminder count of N..", it can mean what it says (ie the Reminder Type does not have a template specified for that reminder count), or that a template is specified but that it does not have Document Template specified, or that it does but the specified Document Template does not have its Content specified.
   See also Administration|Types|Reminder Types for further information on Reminder Types.

Export File
If one or more reminders are to be exported then the CSV file will be generated and then downloaded to the browser for the user to save on the completion of reminder generation.  See also Reminder Export Format.