New! HIPAA Compliant Reports on Your Appointment Reminders

Here at AppointmentReminders.com, we realize how important it is to maintain HIPAA compliance.  We strive to make our interface as user friendly as possible while still maintaining HIPAA compliance.  Sometimes the challenge is finding the right balance. We get requests all the time to sign business associates agreements with our clients to assure them that we are operating under HIPAA guidelines. Although we secure our customer's data, there are other factors that need to be followed by our customers to ensure the highest level of HIPAA compliance.

In addition to keeping the reminders themselves HIPAA compliant, which we have discussed in previous blogs, it is important to keep your customer's PHI (protected health information) safe. Our new 'HIPAA compliant' report option allows you to still receive your nightly reports without worrying about PHI issues.  These reports still have all the information about your appointment reminders, without the PHI. In order to use these reports however, you need to include a Customer ID when you add or import your data. This can be the persons HRN or some other unique identifier that you create.  When you receive the reports, this Customer ID will be the only link to your customer's data. 

Just like all of our reports, it is just a .csv file and can be opened in excel or any other text editor to allow you to sort through the data easily. Here is an example of what a HIPAA compliant report may look like.

Of course, in addition to receiving reports, you can always log in to the website and view all of your reminder details there.

To ensure that your reports are HIPAA compliant, click on the 'Reports' tab and then click the pencil icon to edit your report.  Make sure the HIPAA compliant box is checked and save the report.

That's all there is to it!

Thank you!

Jonah Langer (owner)

jonah@appointmentreminders.com

NEW! Triggers allow you to create multiple reminders for an appointment or send text or email alerts when certain conditions are met.

Update! We have just added the ability for you to create Triggers! 

Triggers allow you to create multiple reminders for an appointment or send text or email alerts when certain conditions are met. 

Some examples of how you might use a trigger are… you could create a trigger that will schedule an additional reminder to go out the day before an appointment when a reminder that goes out a week before an appointment is sent.

You could also create a trigger that sends a follow up message to a customer after an appointment has passed.

You could also set up a text or email alert to notify you immediately if a customer cancels an appointment.

You could set up a trigger that will start with a text message and if that fails (most likely because of a non-mobile number) it could roll over to a call reminder.

We hope you enjoy this new feature!

We view the full documentation on it, follow this link...

http://docs.appointmentreminders.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=278&sid=d2830e03be8e21af6dad64adc1c67cd2

To view the YouTube Tutorial follow this link...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHQxn7_xH-M&feature=youtu.be

New Feature! Send call and email reminders from multiple Caller IDs

Hi - Wanted to let you all know about a great new feature on our site!  We have always allowed you to originate calls from your Caller ID but now you have the ability to add multiple Caller IDs to your account.  This is a great solution for companies that have several offices or facilities.

If you have a Business Account, then you will be able to associate your Caller ID with your phone call reminders as well as your email reminders. For phone call reminders, your call will originate from the Caller ID that you have associated with your reminder type. For email type reminders, your caller ID will be placed at the footer of your email message.

To access this new feature, just log in to your account and go to the Caller ID section. For more information, see our new help posting here...

Caller IDs - Creating, Validating, and Using

Enjoy!

-Jonah Langer (Owner)
AppointmentReminders.com

Maintain HIPAA compliance by allowing your customers to easily opt-out of your automated appointment reminders

OPT ME OUT!

Although you hope that all of your customers will appreciate the automated appointments reminders that you are sending them there are always going to be a few that don't. The best way to accommodate these select few (and often the most outspoken) customers is to allow them to opt-out of your automated reminders with just one simple action. HIPAA compliance also recommends that you provide an easy way for your customers to opt-out and many email providers require it.

So with our service it's easy - and already there! 

When you are sending any type of email reminder, a link is automatically added at the bottom with a one-click mechanism to allow them to unsubscribe.  This allows your customers to unsubscribe quickly. This is also a requirement by many mail providers such as Yahoo, Google, MSN, etc... to keep your emails out of the spam folders.

If you are sending a text message reminder, anytime anyone replies with the keyword 'stop' they are automatically removed from the text messaging list.  They can text 'start' in order to resubscribe.  This is becoming more of an accepted standard in the text messaging world. *Note - If you want people to be aware of this option then you will need to add it to your text message (e.g. text 'stop' to unsubscribe).

If you are sending call reminders, if the person responds by pressing the number '9', they will be excluded from any call type reminders. Again, a very simple way for people to remove themselves. *Note - If you want people to be aware of this option then you will need to add it to your call type reminder (e.g. press '9' to unsubscribe).

You can always log in to your account and manage the list directly through the web interface as well.

Happy Reminding!

-Jonah (Owner)
jonah(@)appointmentreminders.com
www.appointmentreminders.com

New tutorials are now available to help you set up and configure your account

We have just released our first set of 5 tutorials.  These tutorials are intended to help you set up and configure your account as well as learn more about what you can do with it. They are available on our YouTube channel HERE . We plan on releasing more tutorials in the near future.  If there are any topics that you would like to see tutorials created for, please let us know.

The topics that we have just released are...

• Tutorial 1: Getting Started – Sending your first reminder
• Tutorial 2: Creating and editing reminder types
• Tutorial 3: Linking a Google Calendar
• Tutorial 4: Scheduling reminders through a linked Google Calendar
• Tutorial 5: Import Files

You will see a new button available to you on the left side of the screen when you are logged into your account which will take you directly to the tutorials. You can also visit our YouTube Channel directly by clicking on the YouTube link on the bottom of our site.

New Report "Failed Reminders Report"

Hi all!  We just added a new report called the "Failed Reminders Report". If you log into your account and create a new "Failed Reminders Report", it will get sent to you every night after your reminders have concluded for the day.

This report will contain a list of reminders that were not able to be delivered.  The reasons for the non-delivery could be caused by multiple issues such as no answers, busy signals, incorrect phone numbers, or perhaps invalid payment info on your business account or reaching your max limit on a free account.  The failed reminders will only be included in this report if there is no further outreaching that can be done.  In other words, if we can still try to send the reminder tomorrow, it will not show up on this report.

This report will be emailed 10 minutes after the EndTime of your reminder schedule for the day. If your schedule looks like this....

The report will be emailed around 8:10pm. This will allow you to notify (if you wish) any customers who did not receive the reminder.

As with all of our reports, the format is .csv and can be opened in excel or any text reader.

New Feature : View Import File Results

Hi all : Just wanted to let you know of a new feature that was added to the site.  This is an add-on for our 'Import Files' section.

Now when you import a file through the site, you will see a 'file' icon next to your import.  If you click on this icon, you will be given a summary of your import file results including which records resulted in a new contact  or new reminder being added.  You will also see any records that were not added. These will show in RED so you can re import them if needed.

Here is a screenshot of the File Icon

When you click it, you will see all the details of your import file...

I hope you enjoy the new addition!

-Jonah

Hi all- Just added a great new feature to the Create Reminder Types page called "Quick Add". Now you can add a new Text Block or Voice File without having to ever leave the page.

You will now see some buttons on the left hand side of the Reminder Types page....

This makes it so much easier when you are creating your Reminder Types. Enjoy!!!

How to create simple weekly import files for your appointments no matter what scheduling software you use

Hi : In this blog post I would like to talk a little bit about creating weekly import files with your customers appointments.

This is a good solution if your business has the following:

• Does not schedule through Google Calendar
• Has a regular customer base that schedules appointments (not a ton of new customers).

Basically there are 2 steps to importing these appointments:

Step 1 - Create a customer import file (you can do this monthly or weekly or as often as you wish). 

1. Make sure you include the customer ID in this import. (screenshot below).
2. The customer ID is what you will use in your appointment import in step 2.
3. Basically this file is just a .csv file that consists of a few fields to identify your customers.
4. Upload this file to your account through the Import Files section. This will add all of your customers.

Step 2 - Create your weekly appointment import.

1. Basically just a .csv file with the following fields.
2. Upload your file to your account through the Import Files section of our site.
3. This way you don't have to upload all of the customer info every week.
4. If you add more customers, you can simply upload another customer import.

It couldn't be much simpler!

For more info on import files, visit our help topic on the subject here

-Jonah 

jonah@appointmentreminders.com

www.appointmentreminders.com

New Addition! Event View for Linked Calendars

We have just added a great new feature for those of you who link your calendars to our site.  It is the Calendar Event View! You can access it when you link your calendar or if you go to the Calendars Page. Click on the calendar icon for the calendar you want to view.

This will show you all of the events that we were able to read from your linked calendar.  The blue events show events that we added a reminder for.  The red events show events that we did not add a reminder for.

You can click on an event to see details about it...

We are really excited about this new feature! Please stop by and have a look!

-Jonah Langer (Owner)
jonah@appointmentreminders.com
www.appointmentreminders.com