The Patient Communicator (Sending patient messages & reminders)

Transcription

1 The Patient Communicator (Sending patient messages & reminders) Overview The Patient Communicator is used for sending messages and reminders to patients. These messages may be automated and sent in batch (such as appointment reminders), or sent individually (such as sending a patient a message that his lab results were normal). There are three types of messages: Appointment Reminders. These remind patients of scheduled appointments. These are typically sent in batch for example, all patients on the schedule for next week. Preventive Care Reminders. These communicate that an appointment is needed. These are typically sent in batch via a patient query for example, all diabetics that haven t been seen in three months who do not already have an appointment scheduled. Individual Messages. A message can be sent to a particular patient from within their chart for any reason. There are five methods used to communicate with patients: Mail (postcards) Automated Phone calls Text Messages Patient Portal The following forms of communication utilize outside metered services: Automated Phone Calls, Text Messages, messages. For these, there is a $.20 per message fee that will be billed to the practice for each electronic message sent. If you have not already started using the Patient Communicator, contact Customer Support. You may use it the first month, with unlimited messages, for only $1!

2 Automated Voice Reminders Before you begin using voice reminders, you may want to record introductory greetings. The introductory greeting is a pre-recorded message from you that precedes the computer-generated voice of the text of the message. These are not required, but they can add a nice personal touch to the messages. Your messages may also optionally have an outro greeting, that is, a pre-recorded message that is played at the end of the call. Since there are three types of messages, if you use pre-recorded greetings, you will need three versions of them: Sample Appointment Greeting: Hello, this is Susan calling from Rochester Family Practice with an important reminder of an upcoming appointment. Sample Preventive Care Greeting: Hello, this is Susan calling from Rochester Family Practice. You are due for an appointment. We want to provide you with the best care we can, so it s important that you call our office to schedule an appointment. We look forward to seeing you soon. Sample Individual Message Greeting: Hello, this is Susan calling from Rochester Family Practice with an important message. In either of the above, the greeting recorded will be played, followed by an automated voice providing the details of the message. For example, for an appoint reminder call, when the phone is answered or when it goes to voice mail: They would first hear the recorded message in Susan s voice: Hello, this is Susan calling from Rochester Family Practice with an important reminder of an upcoming appointment. This would be followed by the automated voice reading the text: John has an appointment with Dr. Smith on Thursday, May 21 at 10:30am. Please call our office at if it is necessary to reschedule. We look forward to seeing you. In determining how you want the call to flow, keep in mind that the computer may have difficulty pronouncing some names. Dr. Smith, in the example above, would be no problem. But if the doctor s name is less common and harder to pronounce, it is better for you to pronounce the name in the recorded greeting and not have the computer attempt to voice it when the reminder text is read. For assistance in recording the greetings, contact Customer Support.

3 Configuring the Patient Communicator The text of the messages is entered in Tables, Other Tables, Patient Communicator Text. A few standard text entries have been provided for you. You may edit them as appropriate and add your own messages. Select a message from the Text drop-down box at the top of the window, or select Add Message Text to create a new one. The Type indicates whether this message is to be used for Preventive Care (an appointment is needed), an Appointment Reminder, or an Individual Message. You will need to enter the text of the message for each of the five communication methods. Notice in the above example, the Text Message (an SMS message to be sent to the patient s cell phone), is abbreviated and to the point. There is a limit to the number of characters that can be sent in a standard text message. Anything longer than may be cut-off. The easiest way to facilitate entering essentially the same text five times is to enter it once and copy and paste it into the others. Do this by first clicking in the message box of text you want to copy, then Select All (by holding down the Ctrl key on the keyboard and pressing the A key), then Copy (by holding down the Ctrl key and pressing the C key), then click into another message box and Paste (hold down the Ctrl key and press the V key). From there, you can make slight modifications to the text as is appropriate for the communication method. Variables are a very important part of the message. The program replaces them with the appropriate data when they are used. Available variables are: [first] patient s first name [last] patient s last name [provider] a shortened form of the provider s name (e.g., Dr Smith ) [date] date of next appointment (e.g., May 21 ) [day] day of week of next appointment (e.g., Thursday ) [time] time of next appointment [phone] practice phone number Make sure when using variables they are typed exactly as above, enclosed in square brackets. The text of an Appointment Reminder should provide the patient name, day of week, date and time of the scheduled appointment, and possibly the doctor s name. The text of a Preventive Care Reminder should provide the patient s name and possibly the name of the doctor, for patients who are overdue to schedule an appointment. Both should include the office phone number.

4 Note that when using phone numbers in voice messages, it will be necessary to slow down the computer voice in reading the phone number otherwise, it will read it too fast. By using the [phone] variable, the system automatically translates that message to your office phone number with commas to slow it down in the appropriate places for example, 585,,242,,1200. Using commas in the text forces the voice generation to pause. You may use them anywhere in the text where you feel the computer needs to take a breath (slow down). If you hardcode a phone number in a voice message, you will want to include commas as in the example. For Preventive Care reminders, the system defaults to not sending another reminder to a patient within a 30 day period. The period can be increased or decreased in Tools, EMR Set-Up, Configuration.

5 Using the Patient Communicator Overview Since there are three types of patient messages, appointment reminders, preventive care messages and individual messages, there are three primary ways to generate them: Appointment Reminders are generated in batch from the Appointment Manager or from the Appointment List Report. Preventive Care Reminders are generated in batch from the Clinical Patient Query. Individual Messages are sent from the patient s chart. Each will be discussed in detail below. Patient Communication Preferences Each patient has a communication preference that determines the type of message used by default: In the above example, David s communication preference is Text. Since he has a cell phone entered, all reminders will be sent via SMS (text message) to his cell phone. Available communication preferences are: Mail (postcards) Text Home Phone Work Phone Cell Phone Patient Portal Do Not Contact If none is selected (i.e., Unspecified), the system will default to printing a postcard.

6 Any message sent to the patient s portal (whether it is his/her preferred communication method or not) will result in the patient receiving an indicating that he/she has a new message on the portal. The message will contain a link to easily login to the portal. The patient will, of course, need to login using their address and password to view the message. Other than that, we do not recommend using as a means of communicating with the patient as they are not secure and therefore are not HIPAA compliant.

7 Appointment Reminders There are two ways to generate appointment reminders: From the Appointment Manager itself, or from an Appointment Report. In the Appointment Manager, click the Other button then select Send Reminders. In the resulting window, select a single provider or All Providers and click OK. This method allows you to send reminders for one day at a time. From the Appointment List Report (Reports, Appointments, Appointment List), enter the criteria (i.e., range of dates, provider), click OK. When the Print Options window appears, click Options and then choose Reminders. This method allows you to send reminders for more than one day at a time (e.g., for a week). Either of the above opens the Reminders window: The different communication methods can be processed all at one at a time. By default, the window opens with the All Methods selected. In the above example, there are zero patients of the six on today s schedule who will receive postcards to remind them of their appointments. Clicking Process here will, of course, do nothing since no patients qualify. The recommended routine is to leave the Communication Method set to All and click the Process button. If you want to process the methods one-by one: For postcards, select the method of Mail, then click Process. This results in postcards being printed for all patients on the schedule who either have a communication preference of Mail or have none selected. Note: The standard postcard format is 4 per page. You may order these postcards from any stationary or medical supply company. They are typically blank on one side (the program prints on the blank side) and have a graphical design on the other. Next select Portal as a Communication Method, make sure the text of the message is appropriate, then click Process.

8 Next select Text as the Communication Method, verify the text looks appropriate, then click Process. Next select All Voice as the Communication Method. This sends automated phone calls to patients whose communicate preference is either Home Phone, Cell Phone, or Work Phone. If you are not enrolled in the Patient Communicator, the only Communication Methods available to you are Mail printing postcards and Portal. The others will show on the report and would need to be manually called.

9 Preventive Care Reminders Preventive Care reminders are sent from the Patient Query report from Reports, Clinical Reports, Patient Query. The typical method of processing these reminders is to: Select Patient Reminders on the General tab of the Patient Query. This tells the system that it is to take the results of the query and create reminders out of them, instead of printing a report. Select a Preventive Care item in the Preventive tab (e.g., HBA1C is overdue). Select any other pertinent criteria in any of the tabs, such as: o Patient Sex (Patient tab) o Diagnosis Category or Set (Clinical tab) o Medication Category or Set (Clinical tab) o Patient Age (Clinical tab) o Days Since Last Seen (Clinical tab) o Smokers (Clinical tab) o FlowSheet Value (FlowSheet tab) For example, you can create (and save) a query that lists all male patients over the age of 50 who are diabetics, on an ACE inhibitor, whose last A1C is greater than 9, who are smokers and have not been seen in six months. Once you have entered the data needed to select the list of patients, you will want to Save the query. This is done by clicking the Save Query button at the bottom of the window, then giving your query a name. After exiting the program, the next time you launch the program you will notice your query appears on the menu of Clinical Reports at the bottom. Clicking OK on the query opens the Reminders window: There were 590 patients that qualified for this preventive care query. 589 of those patients will receive a postcard. That means there is one patient in this list who either has a communication preference other than mail, or, the one patient already has an appointment scheduled and so will be excluded from the reminders.

10 As in the case of appointment reminders, the recommended procedure is to first verify that the text of the messages are appropriate in Tables, Other, Patient Communicator Text (if you have not already done so). After that, you can simply click Process with the Communication Method set at All Methods. The system tracks on the patient record when preventive care reminders were sent. This is necessary to ensure the practice meets the requirements of Meaningful Use, and also to ensure that the same patient does not receive multiple reminders in a short period of time. For example, a patient who is overdue for a HBA1C, may also be overdue for Flu shot. You would not want to send the same patient a message to schedule an appointment when you process the HBA1C preventive care, and then a few minutes later send another one when you process the Flu shot preventive care. By default, the system will not send multiple reminders to a patient within 30 days. You may change this period in Tools, EMR Set- Up, Configuration.

11 Sending Individual Messages Individual messages are sent from the patient s chart by right-clicking on blank grey space, or, when viewing a document in the chart, by right-clicking on the document. Click on Patient Communicator and then select the appropriate message. This opens the Patient Communicator window: Since the patient s preferred method of communication is Text messages, the system automatically selected the text message related the selected menu item. If you wanted to send the message in via a different method (for example, an automated voice message), you could select it from the Communication Method drop-down box at the top of the window. You may edit the text as is appropriate for this particular patient. Clicking Send sends the message.

12 Checking Reminder Status You may (and should) periodically check the status of electronic reminders. This is done from the Document Queue in Medical Records. For a Method, select Reminders and for Status select Failed. This will show you the reminders sent that for one reason or another failed to send. This may be the result of an invalid address, or a bad phone number. You may also find it helpful to login to our reminders.hstcentral.com website to see the electronic reminders status in more detail. For patients whose reminders failed, you will want to verify their contact information. In the mean time, it is recommended that you change their Preference to Mail to prevent additional failed attempts. If you want to view reminders that were sent successfully, select a Status of Complete.