Patient recall and the communication policy
Recall brings back patients who have not returned in a while: you create inactivity rules per channel and the preview shows how many patients there are and how many are genuinely contactable. Communication sets the practice's send policy, with quiet hours, a time zone and a daily cap per patient. The two screens work together, and consent overrules both.
Both screens sit in the Health menu, as Recall and Communication. The right order is to configure Communication first, because it is the filter every recall passes through.
The send policy
Open Communication. The screen holds a single policy, valid for the whole institution.
- Tick Enable send policy.
- Set Quiet start and Quiet end, for example 9:00 pm and 8:00 am.
- Choose the Time zone. It decides what counts as night for your patients.
- Set the Cap per patient/day. The default is 3 and the maximum is 100.
- Click Save.
With the policy off, sending respects consent only. With it on, it also respects quiet hours and the daily cap. It is a guard against the most common mistake a practice makes: firing a reminder at eleven at night, or sending the same person four messages in one day.
There is one declared exception: urgent messages break through quiet hours and the daily cap. What they never break through is consent and opt-out. If the patient revoked that channel, not even an urgent message goes out on it.
Creating a recall rule
- Open Recall.
- Under New rule, enter the rule Name.
- Set No return in (days). The default is 180 and the accepted range runs from 1 to 3650.
- Choose the Channel from sms, email, whatsapp, voice and push.
- Click Create. The rule appears in the Rules list.
The rule is a simple, checkable filter: patients whose last appointment is older than the number of days you entered. You can have several rules living side by side, for example one at 180 days by SMS for the general base and another at 365 days by email for a specific audience.
The preview is the heart of the screen
Select a rule and click Preview. Two numbers appear side by side. Due is how many patients the rule found. Contactable is how many, out of a sample, would actually receive the message after passing the filters. The screen tells you the size of the sample it used.
Below the numbers comes the part that teaches: the exclusion reasons. They are No consent, Opted out, Quiet hours and Cap reached. That way you know whether your base is small because there are not enough people, or because there is not enough recorded consent.
Maintaining the rules
In the Rules list, each row shows the name, the inactivity days and the channel, with Preview and Remove buttons. Remove deletes the rule and affects no patient and no consent: the rule is only the filter.
How the two screens connect
The contactability arithmetic in the preview uses exactly the policy the Communication screen defines. If you tighten quiet hours or lower the daily cap, the preview of the same recall shows fewer contactable patients an hour later. And consent, which you record in Patient 360, is the layer that neither the policy nor urgency can get around.
Common questions
- Who can change the send policy? It is a setting for the whole institution, not a personal preference. Treat it as an action for whoever runs the operation.
- Why does Contactable come from a sample? Because evaluating the entire base on every preview would be slow. The sample gives the real proportion, and the screen tells you its size.
- Does an urgent message ignore everything? It ignores quiet hours and the daily cap. It never ignores opt-out or consent.
- Does removing a rule erase the history of who was already contacted? No. It simply stops existing as a filter.