The Patient Reminder Queue is a scheduled job used to:

• queue patient reminders for sending
• cancel reminders that are no longer applicable.

It should be scheduled to run daily, preferably outside of business hours.

On completion, reminders may be manually sent via Reporting - Reminders.
Email and SMS reminders may be automatically sent by the Patient Reminder Sender.

Queueing

Reminders are selected for queueing if they have:

• a Next Due Date less than or equal to the current date; and
• an In Progress status; and
• no associated Items with Pending or Error status

It will cancel reminders if:

• the patient is deceased or inactive; or
• the Next Due Date + the Reminder Type's Cancel Time is less than the current date

For each reminder that matches the criteria, one or more Patient Reminder Items will be created according to its Reminder Type's rules, and the associated customer's contacts.

Note that the queue is not rebuilt each time the job runs. Reminders that have been previously added to the queue are left unaltered. This does mean that if you change say the Lead Times, reminders already in the queue will not affected.

The fields are as follows:

Notification

If a user or group has been configured for notification by the Notify field,  a message will be sent summarising the numbers of reminders:

• Queued - the count of reminders queued for sending
• Cancelled - the count of reminders that were cancelled. A reminder can be cancelled if:
  • it has expired
    This occurs if the reminder Due Date + the Reminder Type's Cancel Interval is less than the current date/time
  • the patient is inactive
  • the patient is deceased
  • the customer is inactive
  • the patient no longer has an owner
  • the Reminder Type has been marked inactive
• Errors - the count of reminders that couldn't be processed due to errors.
  This is typically due to the customer not having any contacts that match the Reminder Count rules.
  Reminders in error are displayed in the Errors tab of Reporting - Reminders.
• Skipped - the count of reminders that were skipped during processing. A reminder will be skipped if:
  • the Reminder Type has no Count for the reminder due to be sent; and
  • it is not due for cancellation

Cron Expression

The Minutes, Hours, Day Of Month, Month, and Day Of Week fields determine when the job is run, using a simplified version of a Cron expression:

Note that only one of Day Of Month and Day Of Week may be specified. If one is specified, the other must be set to ?.

If you change the schedule, the new schedule will take effect immediately.

Examples