Patient did not receive SMS reminder

Problem

A patient has notified you that they did not receive their SMS appointment reminder.

Cause

There are a number of things that might cause this to happen:

• The patient's mobile number was not entered correctly
• The patient has "Do not SMS" ticked
• The patient's appointment was booked inside of the three day reminder cutoff period
• Your practice does not have enough SMS credits to send the message
• There was a problem with the patient's mobile phone service provider
• A technical glitch or other issue.

Solution

Check Patient Details

Check the following in Patient Details:

• Open the patient's file and confirm their mobile number is entered correctly.
• Confirm that the "Do not SMS" checkbox is not ticked.
  

If the patient's mobile number was not entered correctly, or they were marked as "Do not SMS", they would not have received an appointment reminder message.

Check the appointment creation date

Next, check the details of the patient's appointment to confirm it was not booked inside of the three-day cutoff period.

1. Open the Appointment Book.
2. Click on the patient's appointment. 
3. Check the details at the bottom.
   
4. Compare the created date to the date of the patient's appointment.

If the appointment was created three days or less before the appointment date, then the patient will not have received an automated reminder message about the appointment. This is because Gentu sends appointment reminders three business days before the patient's appointment.

Check the SMS Report

Next, you can check the SMS Report to determine whether the message was sent or not.

1. Open the Appointment Book. 
2. On the left hand side, select Print > SMS Report.
   
   
3. Enter the date of the patient's appointment.
   
4. The SMS Report will load.

Check the SMS Report for the patient's name. This will tell you if the message was sent or not.

If the patient did not receive their message, but the SMS Report says that it was sent, this could indicate an issue with the patient's mobile phone service provider.

Check your remaining SMS credits

If you have no SMS credits remaining, the appointment reminder will not have sent.

Also, if you have more appointments than available SMS credits, no reminder messages will be sent.

• For instance, if you have 30 appointments booked in on a certain day but only 25 credits remaining, none of those 30 patients will receive a reminder.

The Gentu Support team will send an email to the primary practitioner or the practice administrator when you have run out of SMS credits.

Otherwise, please contact the Gentu Support team to check how many credits you have remaining.

Other

If you have checked all of the above and still cannot determine why the message was not sent, please contact Gentu Support and we would be happy to walk you through the steps above.