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Notifications are the messages VoxHealth sends patients on its own: an appointment was booked, moved, cancelled, or is coming up. They go out by SMS, by email, or both. Settings → Notifications for the templates and schedule. Settings → Notification Log for what actually went out.

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The types

Only reminders and missed-appointment notices are queued ahead of time; everything else is sent as it happens. The queued ones are the ones you can see and cancel before they go.

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Reminder schedule

Reminders are configurable: how many, and how far ahead. A common shape:
  • One a few days out, so there is time to move it
  • One the day before, with a confirm option
  • One the morning of, for the same-day no-shows
More reminders is not better. Three messages for one appointment is the point where patients start ignoring all of them, and where you start paying for texts nobody reads. Start with two.

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Reply to confirm

A patient can reply to the reminder text to confirm. The reply is matched to their appointment and the confirmation is written back to your PMS, so your schedule shows the same confirmed status your staff would have set by hand. Replies that are not a confirmation, such as a question or a request to move the appointment, land in Messages for a person to answer.

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Channels

Each notification type can be sent by SMS, email, or both. SMS gets read; email is where anything longer belongs. Practices generally send reminders by SMS and booking confirmations by both. Patients without a mobile number on file fall back to email automatically.

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The notification log

Settings → Notification Log is the ledger: every message sent to a patient, when, on what channel, to what address, and whether it was delivered, plus what is still queued to go out. It is the first place to look when a patient says they were never told. Filter by patient, by type, or by date.
Check the log on your first day of reminders before you widen the schedule. Wrong-number and unsubscribed patients show up immediately, and it is much easier to fix twenty of them than two thousand.
Patients can opt out of text messages by replying STOP, which is honoured immediately and permanently until they opt back in. Practices sending SMS in the US need their number registered for messaging. Your implementation contact handles this during setup.
  • Messages: the two-way conversations these messages start
  • Campaigns: deliberate outbound sends to a group of patients
  • Reports: the Appt Notifications report shows what went out and which appointments are still unconfirmed