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.
• the ability to select either one specific method to send out a given type of reminder, or select the method depending on the customer's available contacts (eg use SMS if the customer has provided an SMS capable phone number).
• the ability to send out the same reminder to one customer by multiple methods (ie both email and SMS)
• 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 including 'Stopper' and 'Switch' reminders.
• Administration|Types|Reminder Configuration to setup and maintain the timings for each send method and the group templates to be used
• 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|Job|Patient Reminder Queue to queue reminders for sending
• Administration|Job|Patient Reminder Sender to automatically send email and SMS reminders
• Administration|Organisation|Practice to configure the file format when exporting reminders
• How To:Test Reminders for suggestions as to how to test reminders

To send reminders via SMS:

• The Practice must have SMS support configured
• The Reminder Types must have document templates with SMS Templates.

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

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

Each reminder will have one or more 'items', one for each method by which it will be sent out. For these, their states can be as follows:

• Dequeued - the item is no longer queued to be sent - most commonly because it was not processed in time
• Error - an error occurred sending the item
• Queued - the item is queued ready to be sent
• Sent - the item has been sent

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