Experiences with SMS reminders
Submitted by Jimvet on Wed, 06/07/2016 - 10:36
Can anyone comment on implementing Open VPMS SMS reminders ? Did the system work ? What was owner response like compared to letters ? Has anyone used iRecall (a private SMS reminder provider who can extract info from OpenVPMS) ? If so good or bad ?
Re: Experiences with SMS reminders
Hi,
We have implemented automatic appointment reminders and love it.
We don't do other reminders (we don't do vaccinations or flea treatments), but I presume you'd get a similar response from the appointment reminders - convenient, easy to respond etc. We use smsglobal, so can't help with iRecall.
Re: Experiences with SMS reminders
I should point out that Greta is using a pre-release version of 1.9 which supports appointment reminders. SMS reminders for patients are supported in 1.8, but are limited to static text. In 1.9, you can use macros or expressions to generate the SMS.
Re: Experiences with SMS reminders
We may be mistaken but when investigating implementation of SMS reminders for vac, Proheart, worming, it appeared that we were unable to optimise our SMS - ie we only had the option of a vague "your recheck is due now", rather than a specific grouped reminder for say two pets Ray and Kim for vac, HW and worm. The alternative would be sending 6 SMS's which might annoy pet owners. Or am I completely mistaken ?
Re: Experiences with SMS reminders
Jim - you are correct as regards 1.8 - you could only use fixed SMS text.
In 1.9 you can use expressions - see http://www.openvpms.org/documentation/csh/1.9/admin/template/SMSReminder...
For individual reminders the 160 character limit in SMS messages is not really a problem. However, for grouped reminders it potentially is.
I encountered the same problem when renovating the invoice template for 1.9 - I wanted something that producted a concise reminder summary on the invoice, and did not generate reams of output when the customer had lots of patients with lots of reminders.
I suspect that you want to generate something like:
Reminder: Fifi, George, Harry, BoBo have vaccinations due
Please contact us on (02) 6123 4567 for appointments
When I get a minute, I will see if I can build something to generate this.
Regards, Tim G