OpenVPMS has a powerful and flexible system for sending out reminders to clients that their animals are due for a vaccination, dental check, annual check, etc. Its features include:

• as many different types of reminders as you want, each with its own settings and formats of reminder notifications
• automatic generation of a reminder when a product is used or service provided (ie recording that a vaccination was done can generate the reminder for the repeat due in 12 months time)
• support for sending out reminders by post, email, SMS, or generating a list of customers to contact, or a set of address labels. The data can also be exported to CSV format for processing by a 3rd party.
• a group flag that enables optional grouping of reminders so that a customer having multiple animals each with multiple reminders receives only one reminder document listing all the individual reminders
• the ability to define when a given reminder is due, eg 12 months for this product/service, 3 years for another, together with the facility to override this
• flexible definition of when reminders become overdue and what to send out on the first, second, third etc reminders
• automatic cancellation of old reminders
• automatic completion of one reminder by another by making them members of the same Reminder Group. For example you may set a puppy vaccination and an annual canine vaccination as two different reminder types, but belonging to the same reminder group (eg Vaccination), so that when generating a subsequent invoice for a canine annual vaccination, the Canine Annual reminder will automatically "complete" any previous Canine Puppy or Annual reminder.
• highlighting of reminder status on the Patient screens
• colour coding of whether the reminder is not yet due, currently due, or overdue (as green, yellow and red respectively) with the ability to set the length of the 'currently due' window

Note that if you are interested in Appointment Reminders rather than Patient Reminders, see How To: Appointment Reminders

The tools to set up and use reminders are:

• Administration|Types|Reminder Types to setup and maintain each Reminder Type
• Administration|Lookups|ReminderGroups to define the Reminder Groups used to group different reminder types together
• Administration|Templates|Document Templates to define the Document Templates used by each reminder type to define the content of the reminder notifications
• Products|Information to attach reminders to the products so that when the product is invoiced, a reminder is created
• Customers|Information to display and edit the contact information to check and update how reminders are to be notified (ie which contact has the purpose 'Reminder')
• Patients|Medical Records to display and perhaps add a reminder for a patient
• Reporting|Reminders to display and generate the reminder notifications
• Administration|Organisation|Practice to configure the file format when exporting reminders

To send reminders via SMS:

• The Practice must have SMS support configured
• All document templates used for reminders must have SMS text. This includes the Grouped Reminders template.

In addition, Reminder Types can be configured to override a customer's default reminder method by selecting the SMS check box.

A reminder can be in one of 3 states as follows:

• In Progress - is active, ie neither completed nor cancelled
• Completed - what should have happened has (eg the next vaccination)
• Cancelled - the reminder either became too old and was automatically cancelled or it was manually cancelled

Only In Progress reminders are processed by Reporting|Reminders. The possible actions depend on the age of the reminder, whether the reminder type has a template, the 'reminder count' (how many reminders have been sent previously) and associated template, and the customer's contact details. The actions are as follows:

• 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 lists the customers names with their pet's name and the reminder type, but it is possible to modify the report to generate address labels)
• Export - the details will be exported to file. See Reminder Export format for a description of the file
• 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

For a full discussion of how reminders are processed, see Reporting|Reminders