Appointment Cancellation via SMS

Patients can cancel their appointments from the reminder message sent to them via SMS. The process is as follows:

• The patient receives an SMS appointment reminder, and can reply to it and cancel their appointment if they cannot attend.
• A message is sent back to the Appointments system by a unique identifier attached to the specific appointment that the reminder was generated for.
• A text is sent back to the patient once the appointment is cancelled:

What you need to do...

To enable your patients to be able to cancel their appointment via SMS you need to complete the following:

Step 1

• Configure Vision+ SMS Settings for Patient Reply.
  See SMS Settings for Appointment Cancellation for more information.

Step 2

• Create a new report and SMS template for reminding patients about today's appointments giving them the option to cancel.

• From Appointments - All, create a search filter for today's appointments.
• From Appointments - SMS Merge Templates, in SMS create a template for reminding patients about today's appointments and giving them the option to cancel, called, for example, 'Today' using the new merge fields available.
  See Today's Appointment Reminders for more information.

Step 3

• Update required existing SMS appointment templates with a reply to cancel option.
  See Updating Existing SMS Templates for more information.