If you are experiencing issues with reminders, you can troubleshoot these issues yourself by checking these frequently asked questions. If your issue is still not resolved, you can contact Halaxy for assistance.
Click the question to view the answer.
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Why does a patient keep getting reminders when I set them up to not receive reminders?
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Can we cancel all future SMS reminders and only send email reminders?
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Can I disable all reminders but manually send a reminder if I need to?
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If I cancel my reminders on an individual level, will it cancel the group's preferences?
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How can I change the address used for email reminders from Halaxy to mine?
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Can individual practitioners use their own reminder settings?
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How do I send a reminder to patients with expired or expiring referrals?
First, check the send status of your reminders. There are several reasons the reminder may have failed. Some of the most common ones include:
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Insufficient credits – you do not have enough credits to send the reminder.
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Incorrect contact details – you may have the incorrect email address or phone number.
You can run a Reminders report to see a list of which reminders failed so that you only need to resend the failed reminders.
See related article: View send status of reminders
In accordance with industry standards, this occurs when the patient has unsubscribed from receiving messages from your practice by texting STOP, UNSUBSCRIBE or CANCEL as a response. Halaxy cannot prevent a patient from doing this.
If a patient has done this and you still want them to receive communication, you can set individual reminder preferences for them to receive email reminders instead. Alternately, you can ask them to resubscribe by texting START or UNSTOP to reverse this process.
If a patient believes they did not receive their reminder, you can confirm the status of that reminder by going to the patient's appointment in the calendar and clicking the bell icon. Here you'll see the reminder history and the status of notifications, including emails and SMS.
Whilst you can set individual patient preferences so that they do not receive SMS or email reminders on their General page, you may have inadvertently overridden those preferences in your Reminders settings. If you have your own individual practitioner setting for reminders, make sure you change the settings there and not in the group's reminder settings.
Yes. You can find instructions on disabling reminders for specific fees in our our article on disabling reminders.
Yes. This applies to scheduled pre-appointment reminders only. If you would like to only send email reminders to your patients:
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Click Settings > Reminders and expand the settings for the relevant group or practitioner.
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For the group or practitioner settings you want to edit, look for the appointment reminder type you want to cancel. Under Actions, click
pencil icon.
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In the pop-up, tick the Email checkbox and leave the SMS checkbox unticked.
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Click Save.
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In the pop-up, tick All new and existing future appointments to disable reminders to all future-dated appointments, including those you have already scheduled. Then, select whether you want to apply this to Patients without reminder preferences or Patients without reminder preferences.
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Click OK.
To edit the content of your reminder emails, see our article on customisingyour reminder templates.
Yes. See these related articles:
If I cancel my SMS reminders, should I also cancel my custom name and dedicated number subscriptions?
If your practice will no longer be using SMS at all, you can end your subscriptions. However, you may still want to use custom name or dedicated number for:
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One-off SMS messages
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Manually sent reminders
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Patients who have individual reminder preferences.
If you choose to keep your subscriptions, you will be still charged credits monthly regardless of how much you use SMS reminders.
No. When preferences are set on an individual level, they will not impact the groups preferences. Similarly, if the group’s preferences change, they will not affect your individual settings. Group preferences will only affect members of the practice who have not created their own individual preferences.
Go to Settings > Reminders. For the group or individual practitioner settings, your credit balance should be at the top of your reminder settings.
To avoid running out of credits, you can enable automatic top-up. This automates your account to purchase a specific amount of additional credits whenever your credit balance falls below 10 credits.
SMS messages cost 1 credit for the first 160 characters. If your message is longer than this, it costs 1 credit for every 153 characters. Make sure to enable automatic top-up of credits so you never have to worry about your SMS messages not being sent out.
See our article: Customise your reminder templates
You can choose the number of days or hours before the appointment and the exact time that you would like email or SMS pre-appointment reminders to be sent.
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Click Settings > Reminders.
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For the group or practitioner settings you want to edit, look for Pre-appointments reminder type. Under Actions, click
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Under SMS Schedule and Email Schedule, select how many days or hours before the appointment to send your reminder.
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Click Save.
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In the pop-up, select how you want to apply the new settings, then click OK.
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Under Appointment Reminders, click Edit preferences.
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In the pop-up, under Edit Reminder Preferences, you can select the following options:
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Which days should reminders be sent?: Select your preferred type of days to send the reminder.
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What time should reminders be sent?: Select your preferred time to send the reminder.
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Click Save.
You can change the address that emails are sent from in your Email Sender Preferences. This will allow you to set different sender addresses and reply-to addresses for all the different email functions of Halaxy.
Yes. By default, reminder preferences are set at the group level and apply to all practitioners in the group. However, you can add an individual reminder level if a practitioner wishes to use their own reminder settings or templates.
Individual reminder levels always take precedence over the group level; if there is no individual level set up for a practitioner, they will use the group level settings.
To set up individual reminder preferences:
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Click Settings > Reminders.
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In the top right, click Add New Level.
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In the pop-up, select the practitioner from the drop-down menu then click Save.
The practitioner now appears in the Reminders page as an individual. Click the plus icon next to their name to change their individual reminder preferences.
Note
By default, practitioners use the group credit card for reminders and draw from the group Halaxy credit balance even if they use an individual reminder level. If you want the practitioner to use their own credit card for their SMS reminders, they must have their own individual payment settings for Halaxy credits and maintain a separate Halaxy credit balance.
You can send automatic email or SMS notifications to patients if their referrals are expired or expiring by using the Campaigns feature.
See article: Notify patients of expiring referrals
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