Genie Two-Way SMS

The major advantage of this method over using another third party carrier, is that your patients’ SMS replies are automatically collected and displayed in your appointments book, without any intervention on your part. This should prove to be a huge time-saver for reception staff, since they will no longer have to make, or answer, any telephone calls regarding appointment reminders.

Setup

To use Genie’s SMS system, you need to pre-purchase SMS credits. There is a sliding scale of costs depending on volume purchased:

Cost Schedule: (Minimum Quantity: 500)

500+                22 cents per message

1000+                20 cents per message

2500+                18 cents per message

* Please note that these are interim prices until a final agreement has been reached with our suppliers. These prices may change in the future.

You can purchase SMS by the following methods:

If there is a provider in your practice that does not wish for any of their patients to receive SMS reminders then you can mark them as Don't send SMS reminders for my appointments in their User Preferences, General Tab.

Before you first start sending, you will need to go to Appts > Genie Two-Way SMS and click the Setup button to open the window below:

At the top of this window you can create the message you wish to send.

Use the Name Format popup to specify how the provider’s name should appear e.g. Dr Izzy Better, Dr Better, Izzy etc.

Use the Date Format to specify how the appointment date should appear.

As you make these changes, the sample message in blue will be updated below. The number of characters in the sample message is also shown.

Note:  If your message is greater than 160 characters, it will be truncated, meaning the remainder of the message will not be sent, so it is important to keep the message within the 160 character limit. Remember to take into account the number of characters in the longest provider’s name, if you are in a multi-doctor practice.

Next, you can specify whether you want reminders to be sent for just consultations, just procedures, or both. If you tick the checkbox named Check for replies every hour, Genie will automatically check for replies every hour after sending, as long as you do not quit out of Genie on this machine.

Finally, you can automate the entire sending and receiving of replies. Only one computer on the network can be designated to perform the sending and retrieving of messages. By default this will be the computer you are currently working on. However, you can change it to another computer on the network if you wish, by selecting it from the popup menu.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Although the name of your server machine may appear in this popup, you cannot use the server to send and receive messages. You must select a client machine.

When sending SMS messages automatically you can choose to either send a reminder for all appointments for the following day, or you can send reminders in the afternoon for appointments due the following morning, and send reminders in the morning for all appointments due the same afternoon.

If you select the latter option, Genie will assign a random time at which they will be sent. You can change this time to something else if you wish, but please avoid sending on the hour or half-hour, otherwise we may end up with hundreds of hits on our server at 5:00PM. This isn’t a major problem, however it may cause delays in sending the messages on.

You must also specify the time of your first afternoon appointment, so that Genie knows which messages to send in the morning of the same day, and which to send the afternoon before.

Send Monday's Messages on Friday will ensure that messages for Monday are sent on a Friday, avoiding having to leave your computer on to send messages over the weekend.

Once you have finished setting up, click the OK button to save your settings.

Sending and Receiving Manually

To manually send SMS messages you will need to go to the day of appointments you wish to send messages for and then go to Appts > Genie Two-Way SMS. This window will display all the patients with appointments for the day displayed.

If you are in Today’s appointments, then only those patients with an appointment after the current time are displayed.

Note that patients can be marked as “No SMS” in their demographic window.

In the top right corner of the SMS window, the Show Remaining Msgs button, when clicked, will display in red how many pre-purchased SMS messages you have remaining.

Purchase Msgs will allow you to purchase SMS credits online. This function is not yet available so instead downloads the PDF fax form.

The Monthly Report and Daily Report buttons will  show the date and time at which our server received the messages from you; the date, time and detail of the messages that were sent to the patient’s mobile; and the date, time and detail of the reply received from the patient.

Once you have ticked/unticked the people you would like to send a message to click the Send button.

In the individual provider’s appointment book display there is a column named Confirmed. You can move this column anywhere you like so that it can be viewed more easily. To do this, open Appts > Appt Preferences and click the Modify Columns button, then drag and drop the Confirmed column to the position you want e.g as shown below:

You can adjust the width of the column by changing the number in the Width column.

After the SMS reminders have been sent, the Confirmed column will display “Awaiting Reply”, as shown below.

If you have selected the automatic checking option in Setup, then Genie will check for replies 10 minutes and 1 hour after sending the message. You don’t have to do anything. If the patients have sent replies then they will just automatically appear in the Confirmed column.

To manually check for replies, you can go to Appts > Get SMS Replies

OR

Appts > Genie Two-Way SMS, click the Receive tab and then click the Get Replies button.

Note: Our beta-testing suggests that 50% of patients who receive a reminder, will send a reply. Of these, 50% reply within 3.5 minutes, and 95% have replied within one hour. Your practice manager may want to do a manual receive first thing in the morning to catch the remaining 5%.

Note: If you send two reminders to the same mobile phone number e.g. for a mother and child who both have an appointment then, depending on the order in which she replies, the two appointments may get the answers swapped around. If the replies for both are the same, there’s no problem, but if she cancels the child’s appointment, but confirms her own, then it may appear around the wrong way, so this should be borne in mind.

Sending a Single SMS Message

You can also send just a single message to any patient by right-clicking on their appointment and choosing SMS. This will create the standard appointment reminder message, but you can overwrite this with any message you like:

If the patient replies to this message, this will also display in the Confirmed column of the appointment book.

Toggle SMS Replies

If you have the All tab selected in the appointments book, i.e. you are viewing all providers’ appointments, you can select the Appts > Toggle SMS Replies menu item to replace the patients’ names with any replies recorded. Select it again, or click the TODAY button to toggle back.

TROUBLE-SHOOTING

In order to use Genie’s SMS system, you must be able to send webservices messages to our server. If you can view the Software Updates window in the Special menu then you’re ready to go.

If you cannot view the Software Updates window, then the most likely reason is that you are running a proxy server. You should contact your network administrator and ask them to open Port 8080 so that you are able to connect to “www.geniesolutions.com.au”.