Dental and medical blueprint
Reminders sent on a schedule, replies handled, cancellations offered to the waitlist, and anything unclear handed to the desk as a call task.
The front desk phones patients instead of looking after the ones in the room
Practice management system · SMS gateway · Email · Waitlist
7, of which 1 stay with a person
Two to three weeks
Free to use, adapt and build from. No email needed and no attribution asked for.
Every step, in order, including where it forks and where a person stays.
Every appointment in the next seven days, read from the practice system. Runs once, at a quiet hour, rather than polling all day.
Consent and preferred channel, read from the patient record. Not assumed from having a phone number on file.
Practice name, date, time, and which clinician. Nothing about why they are coming in. That restraint is the whole design, and the compliance note below explains why.
Replies are read and matched to the appointment they belong to.
Reschedules that do not fit, anything a patient replies that is not a confirmation, and every call task. The workflow exists to make this list short, not to remove it.
A cancelled slot goes to the waitlist in order, one at a time with a window to reply, rather than to everybody at once. Offering the same slot to nine people creates eight disappointments.
Every appointment ends in a known state, and the desk's list is the exceptions rather than the whole diary.
Every one of these has happened. A workflow that has not been designed against them is a demo rather than a system.
Maintenance windows and bad nights happen, and the run is deliberately scheduled into one.
Retried with backoff. Still failing at 6am, the desk is alerted with enough time to work from the printed list. A silent failure would be worse than no automation at all.
People answer questions with questions, and a patient asking whether they can bring their daughter is not a confirmation.
Anything that is not a clear confirm, cancel or reschedule becomes a call task with the full message attached. The workflow does not guess at a patient's meaning.
A server reading times in its own zone sends the morning-of reminder at 4am twice a year.
Every time is read and sent in the practice's timezone, and the transition dates are tested rather than assumed.
They are entitled to, and continuing after it is both illegal and the fastest route to a blocked number.
Honoured immediately, written back to the patient record so the desk can see it, and the desk is told to arrange reminders another way.
Federal health privacy rules govern anything that identifies a patient together with their care. A reminder naming a procedure, or a message to the wrong number, is a disclosure.
What the workflow does. No clinical detail in any message: practice name, date, time, clinician. Numbers verified against the record before sending, and the message content reviewed with the practice before it goes live. This describes what the workflow does; it is not legal advice, and your practice should have its own agreement in place with any vendor handling patient data.
Desk time on reminder calls
Most of it back
Calls become exceptions rather than the whole list. How much depends entirely on list size; the ROI calculator will do it with your numbers.
Reminders actually delivered
Every consented patient
Because it runs from the diary rather than from whoever had time, so a busy Tuesday no longer means a skipped Wednesday.
Cancelled slots offered on
Within minutes
Mechanical. The waitlist is worked the moment the slot opens rather than when somebody notices.
Three weeks or so, then a flat monthly fee to run it. Or take the specification above and build it yourself, which is genuinely fine and is why it is up here.