Effective communication in healthcare is pivotal to managing the tasks that go into guiding a patient from sickness to health. SMS, a medium once confined to mobile has now expanded its capabilities to help healthcare agencies manage administrative tasks, patient care, internal communications and marketing with ease and at an affordable cost.
Visit the SMS for Healthcare page
While smartphone usage, and with it, the reliance on apps is steadily on the rise, it still hasn’t caught on with the ubiquity of cellular phones. While 92% of US adults in the 18-29 demographic own a smartphone the percentage decreases for older demographics with only 42% of adults over 65 owning a smartphone.
SMS text messaging in healthcare helps cut down on appointment no-shows, making sure patients stick to medication schedules or informing staff about timetable changes. Today, the move to cloud platforms has further expanded the capabilities of SMS for healthcare through automation, better personalization and application integrations that make your SMS campaigns work in sync with other healthcare applications.
Appointment Reminders and Alerts
Healthcare facilities and personnel have to deal with hundreds and thousands of appointments every day. New appointments come in, old ones are confirmed or canceled, and then many fail to show up altogether. Managing this process can be frustrating and confusing unless there is a proper communication strategy in place. By asking patients to sign-up to SMS healthcare updates, facilities can reach out to patients with SMS reminders before the day of the appointment. By setting up your keywords, the SMS can ask the patient to confirm with a “Yes” or a “No”. A “Yes” will automatically confirm the appointment while a “No” can be made to trigger the next SMS asking them to reschedule or thank the patient for the update.
Further SMS healthcare alerts can be set up to inform patients about test results, recurring checkups, and prescription refills. Recurring alerts can be used to make sure patients adhere to their medication schedule and also encourage them through educational information, health tips and more.
For in-house hospital communications that extend beyond patient care, healthcare facilities can use SMS for notifications about cleaning and maintenance schedules, timetable changes, staff meetings and informal affairs such as employee birthdays.
What can you do with CallHub?
Schedule text messages
An automated service lets you plan and schedule your text messages to be sent out at the time of your choosing. You can set up mass texting campaigns to send appointment reminders before the day of the appointment or use it to automatically send out invites before an event.
Personalize messages
Personalize your text messages with custom “tags” that let you automatically include individual details into your SMS. For example, a generic message like “Please confirm your appointment with ABC. Reply with “Yes” to confirm or “No” to reschedule.” can turn into something more personal like, “Hey John, Please confirm your appointment at 11.30 with ABC. Reply with “Yes” to confirm or “No” to reschedule.”.
Sign-up campaigns
Patients can sign-up to receive reminders, updates, and alerts by messaging a keyword to the number of your healthcare facility. You can also use the feature to collect patient details which can be updated to your contact list or synced with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.
Automated responses
You can set up automatic responses to SMS text messages based on keywords. For example, patients responding with “Yes” to an appointment confirmation message can be sent a thank you message with the confirmed details, and those responding with “No” can be sent a text message asking if they’d like to reschedule.
How do I get started?
For a demo of how to run a text messaging campaign through CallHub, watch this simple video tutorial.
Watch demo on text message campaigns
Or sign up right now to get started for free.
