One of our challenges is that if the person booking appointments does not use the correct booking reason (Exam/ Scale & Polish etc) it can throw the recalls out. The system does not then identify that a previous appointment has occurred or may not identify that there is an upcoming appointment. This then means the patients gets unnecessary comms and then makes a phone call!

We are absolutely inundated with patients and have a high volume of new patients booking in with us. We make sure this is easily accessible from the website. If it starts getting less busy, we run a report on all patients that are about to lapse and email them to offer appointments - typically we get around 5-10% responding to book appointments.

Our clinicians try to convert unregistered emergency patients and many of the parents of our NHS kids try to sign up after their kids have been seen.

Hey ​@Rob ! Lovely to see you on the Community 

Thank you for sharing this feedback - it can be frustrating to make sure the team are all utilising recalls correctly and then managing the knock-on impacts of any user-errors. I’ve reached out to put some time in with you to talk about this.

Secondly, thank you for sharing how you generate business through the lapsed patient report. This is a helpful tip and one we recommend a lot 

We book all our recalls as the patients leave.

This way it reduces the amount of recalls that need to go out and also helps with availability. ​@Molly H 

We’ve really found that the automated recall messages have a low response rate, so it’s more successful to pre-book patients in.

However, what I am finding challenging is, when it comes to 6 months down the track and we have to confirm appointments for these recalls, some people aren’t replying or we have to chase them up.
I’d really like to see a more tailored workflow for following up recalls with automated messages - and also make it more personalised - rather than just send out a standard confirmation message for recalls, as you would for any treatment type. 

I would like to see the ability to filter recall patients based on their age. We would like to send differently worded emails to children and different ones to adults. The ones for children don’t need to have information about whitening or braces and instead can have more child friendly emojis and pictures.

I’d also second this - we would like to be able to send tailored messages for recalls as I mentioned in my post. Tailoring for age is a good idea.

I was thinking more along the lines of tailoring the confirmation process for recalls as we get a higher cancellation rate for these types of appointments.
Something along the lines of - A separate reminder text for recalls compared to normal appointments, asking them to confirm with “Y” 3 or 4 weeks out. If they do reply Y, then send them a normal reminder text a few days out.

If they don’t reply Y, to minimise cancellations, sending them a tailored message with “Hi, we’ve been trying to confirm your appointment but have been unsuccessful, please call us to rebook another time”.

This could be refined but essentially the idea is around some tailored workflow/confirmations/reminders to close the gap of patients cancelling or not showing up for recalls they have booked 6 mths ago.

Hey ​@Anne-Maree Siderides & ​@Milo! 

Just wanted to drop a quick note to say thanks a ton for sharing your thoughts on our recall messaging system. Really appreciate you taking the time to give us your feedback. I’ve passed your suggestions on to the team so we can look into ways to make things even better.

Your ideas around making the messages more personalised and tailored really resonated with us, and it’s exactly the kind of input that helps drive improvements.