Increasingly, healthcare providers are turning to technology to solve this issue. At the forefront of this technological revolution is the power of Text Messaging in Healthcare, a tool that has shown great promise in improving patient adherence and engagement. But how exactly does this work? Let’s dive in.

Powering Medication Adherence Through Text Messaging in Healthcare

Patient preference and adherence is a critical component of effective healthcare, but nearly 50% of patients do not take their medications as prescribed. This non-compliance can lead to severe health repercussions and increased healthcare costs. Enter the game-changer: Conversational Messaging. You’ll be impressed to know that the ‘Impact of Reminders on Adherence’, A study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research found that text message reminders improved medication adherence rates by 17.8%

SMS messaging for healthcare offers a straightforward, cost-effective, and patient-friendly solution to medication non-adherence. With personalized medication reminders delivered right to a patient’s mobile device, patients are more likely to stick to their prescription schedules. Messaging can further encourage Patient preference and adherence by providing clear instructions for medication intake, addressing common concerns about side effects, and offering timely support when patients need it.

Enhancing Appointment Compliance via Text Messaging in Healthcare

Missing healthcare appointments is a pervasive issue that leads to delayed care, disrupted treatment plans, and unnecessary healthcare costs. The U.S. healthcare system incurs over $150 billion in annual costs due to no-show appointments, as demonstrated by a study released in the BMC Health Services Research journal. This problem, too, can be tackled effectively through SMS messaging.

SMS healthcare text reminders for appointments significantly reduce the likelihood of no-shows. Moreover, by enabling two-way communication, text messaging allows patients to easily reschedule appointments if needed. This reduces the chances of empty appointment slots, enhancing clinic efficiency.

As the ‘Impact of Reminders on Appointment Attendance’ study in the Journal of American Board of Family Medicine, text message reminders reduced the rate of missed appointments by nearly 30%. Furthermore, it also fosters stronger patient-doctor relationships by maintaining consistent communication and demonstrating the healthcare provider’s commitment to the patient’s well-being.

Transforming Overall Patient Engagement through Text Messaging in Healthcare

Beyond improving patient preference and adherence and appointment compliance, messaging can transform overall patient engagement. For example, The survey conducted by the National Library of Medicine provided intriguing data about patients’ communication preferences. A remarkable 98.2% of patients found text messages to be a favorable mode of communication, and 95.5% felt a heightened sense of connection with their healthcare team through this medium. Additionally, 91.9% of respondents agreed that these text updates reduced their need to make calls to the office.

Equally noteworthy is that 91.9% of patients showed a clear preference for text updates over other communication methods such as emails, phone calls, or patient portal messages. By texting regular health tips, wellness checks, and encouragement, SMS marketing services can foster healthier lifestyles and a greater sense of connection between patients and healthcare providers.

This two-way communication also empowers patients, giving them a more active role in their healthcare journey. This empowerment not only enhances patients’ overall satisfaction but also improves health outcomes by promoting active participation in their healthcare.

Why Choose SMS-Magic: The Best SMS Marketing Services

With numerous SMS service providers in the market, it’s important to choose one that truly stands out. SMS-Magic offers the best SMS marketing services, tailored to meet the unique needs of healthcare professionals.

We understand the necessity of ensuring patient adherence and preference in the healthcare industry. That’s why our services are designed to deliver personalized, timely, and accurate messages. Through our robust platform, you can send appointment reminders, medication alerts, and follow-up messages that keep your patients engaged and compliant.

Moreover, SMS-Magic’s user-friendly platform allows healthcare providers to easily manage their communication with hundreds or even thousands of patients. Our services are HIPAA-compliant, ensuring all patient communication is private and secure.

At SMS-Magic, we’re committed to harnessing the power of conversational messaging to enhance patient adherence. We’re here to help healthcare providers leverage this powerful tool to promote better patient outcomes. So why wait? Join us in driving SMS healthcare forward with SMS-Magic, and let’s make non-adherent patients a thing of the past.

Thank you for reading our blog! Stay tuned for more insights on how messaging is shaping the future of various industries. Remember, with SMS-Magic, your communication possibilities are endless. Follow us to get timely updates. 

Medication Delays and Forgetfulness

The National Library of Medicine reported that up to 50% of patients taking medications struggle to maintain their physician’s recommendations. One of the top factors contributing to nonadherence is a lack of social support and overconfidence in patients’ memory. Thankfully, messaging can aid in both areas.

According to Science Direct, short and simple SMS messaging has proven to reduce medication delays from 85% to 19% after adding a text messaging solution in a clinical trial. The study found that personalized and timely reminders through SMS can improve medication adherence, saving medication costs and leading to substantial improvements in health and disease management.

Reducing No-Shows with SMS Messages

Missing appointments can wreak havoc on patient health as well as office efficiency, creating longer wait times and inefficient use of resources. Research shows that the primary reason patients miss appointments is forgetfulness, and sending a simple text message reminder can help keep them on track.

Messaging not only reduces patient no-shows to appointments. Simple texts can also ensure they arrive on time. The domino effect of late arrivals can disrupt the flow of the entire day. Reminding them of the date and time via messaging days before, 24 hours prior, and the day of the appointment can help ensure patients arrive on time.

Use SMS Messaging to Engage Patients

You can also use messaging to check in with your patients between appointments, keeping them engaged in their health and with your office. Creating automated messages using your database (CRM) and a messaging platform like SMS-Magic can save your office time. By creating segmented lists based on various factors in your database, you can send personalized and relevant messages to their phone screen.

Asking questions is a fantastic way to prompt engagement, like “Have you gotten your 30 minutes of exercise for your heart health today?” or “Meditation is a great way to reduce anxiety. Here’s a FREE 5-minute session [Link].” These interactive check-ins will keep your patients engaged with helpful information and can help keep your services in mind.

Sending Helpful Healthcare and Program Information

Absorbing healthcare information can be overwhelming for patients at times. You can help them understand their medical plan, prescriptions, and diagnosis by sending messages with links to more information that can supplement office visits and phone calls.

In addition, healthcare providers often recommend non-pharmaceutical interventions like meditation, mindfulness exercises, mental healthcare, or smoking cessation programs, and messages are crucial to keeping them on track. These program messages can be inspirational and motivating, provide links to assignments or videos, or be informational with recent statistics and research. Regardless of the information sent, messaging can send it all to their phones, keeping your patients committed, informed, and up to date.

Use Surveys to See How You’re Doing

While adding messaging as a communication channel will help your patients stay on top of their health and keep your office efficient, there are always ways to improve. Surveys help you gather information to improve your processes, and you can obtain this valuable feedback quickly with messaging. The text message survey can be a poll, text-to-vote, or net promoter score, or you can also include a link to a web-based survey. Keyword triggers can help gather even more data you need with a back-and-forth flow of questions and answers.

The Bottom Line

Although your patients may be busy, most of them check their phones more than 90 times a day, and you can use this to your advantage by sending vital medical information and reminders directly to their phones with messaging.

Ready to get messaging working for your staff and your patients? To get started with SMS-Magic, contact our customer support team for a demo or a free trial!

Tips for Using Text Messaging for Healthcare and Wellness

1. Automate appointment scheduling.

Text messaging reduces appointment no-shows by 40%. You can make it easy for your clients and patients to book services with automated scheduling and reminders. The option to easily reschedule via text message prevents no-shows and by using automation you save time by not having to make changes manually.

2. Stay compliant with patient privacy.

By choosing a compliant and secure text messaging platform you’ll ensure that you are HIPAA compliant. A secure messaging platform with administrative functions to control settings on sending and receiving messages means you never have to stress about ensuring patient privacy. 

3. Share wellness tips.

SMS messages offer a natural way to converse with your clients. When you regularly reach out with relevant tips and information, you create a stronger relationship with your clients. Using SMS messages to share wellness tips is a powerful yet simple way to show your clients you care about them, their health and their well-being.

4. Streamline personalized healthcare communication and education.

Texting allows patients and caregivers to use rule-based messaging to send messages about health coaching, post-discharge care instructions, taking medications, or following special diets. This helps them stay on track with their personalized healthcare plans and recommendations. In fact, daily text messaging reminders have been shown to increase medication adherence by up to 68%.

5. Encourage patient participation in preventative healthcare.

Provide health tips, invitations to community wellness events, or recommend specific preventative screenings. By sending these on their preferred channel of text messaging they will be more likely to engage with your recommendations. 

The Bottom Line 

Patients and wellness clients expect personalized communication via text messaging. As the healthcare landscape changes to include many more virtual appointments and experiences, text messaging will play an integral role. If you haven’t yet adopted text messaging for your team and want to learn more, schedule a demo and we’d be happy to share our expertise with you, answer questions and show you what text messaging can do for your contact center.

Auto-responses immediately attend to patient requests, automated campaigns share wellness tips, product and services information and other wellness-related insights. SMS scheduling makes it simple to book appointments and an intuitive Inbox makes conversing 1:1 with clients as easy as can be.

We put together this infographic to give wellness providers a quick overview of how you will better serve your patients with SMS messages from SMS-Magic.

If you haven’t yet adopted business text messaging for your team and want to learn more, schedule a demo and we’d be happy to share our expertise with you, answer questions and show you what text messaging can do for your business results.

You know the drill: You schedule appointments with patients or clients, then you have to call to remind them. Your phone call goes to voicemail, so you send an email to make sure they get the reminder, only to have that email sit unread in their inbox. Or the patient does respond, but to reschedule their appointment at the last minute, leaving that time open that another patient could have used.

Using SMS messages to schedule appointments is more convenient for patients and more readily to be seen and responded to than voice mail or email. The result for your practice is far fewer missed appointments or last-minute cancellations.

• Communicate the way they prefer: Patients love the ease of scheduling an appointment or series of appointments with immediate confirmation texted back to their mobile device.
• Break through the noise: Since their phone is always with them, you’re more likely to reach them as they’re 6X more likely to read text messages than respond to any other communication channel.
• Make responding convenient: The ability to reschedule right from their smartphone means they can do so at their convenience, no matter where they are.

Your patients have busy lives. Your practice must optimize the time available for appointments to help your patients stay healthy and well. Text messaging offers a simple way to provide value to both your patients and your practice.

How to Schedule Appointments with Text Messaging

Scheduling appointments with messaging generally follows these steps.

Please note: In the conversations below, green represents an automated conversation, yellow represents a 1:1 conversation.

Offer your patient an appointment calendar via SMS messages. Simply send a message to an individual (or a list of patients) that includes the link to your online scheduling application.

 

Automatically update the patient’s record. Your calendar application integrates with your CRM to update the patient’s record with the new appointment. This update triggers an automated message campaign for confirmation and reminders, taking the load off your front office staff.

 

Automate rescheduling when a patient has a conflict. When a patient replies #CHANGE, the rescheduling message flow is automatically triggered.

 

Automatically confirm the new appointment. When the patient reschedules, an updated confirmation message is sent, and the reminder process is restarted. Reminders can be set to automatically send at intervals you specify.

 

Use SMS Messages to Remind Patients of Other Needs

There are times when patients must bring documents to their appointments or take actions prior to their appointments. You may need to make a copy of their updated insurance card or have them fast before a lab test, for example. These reminders can also be automated via text messaging based on the type of appointment that’s scheduled.

 

The Bottom Line

Scheduling and confirming patient appointments has never been easier. Conversational text messaging will save your front office staff time and your patients will sense a higher level of care and attention. They’ll feel empowered to ask questions, reschedule appointments easily and remember what they need to do before—or bring with them—to their appointments.

You’ll have happier patients and a more efficient practice.

Even better, your clients and patients are more likely to read text messages than any other form of promotion, by a factor of 6 or more.

That means you can offer personalized promotions, conveniently delivered to their smart phone. Which makes your clients feel appreciated and special.

A number of our SMS-Magic messaging customers use conversational messaging to send updates and wellness promotions to their clients.

Here are some examples.

Reach More Patients with Wellness Promotions

Whether you’re a franchised drug store or a small family-owned health market, you can powerfully promote your wellness products and services using text messaging.

Promote new wellness products. Let’s say you have a new line of dermatology products designed just for women over 50. Here’s how you can use conversational text messaging to promote them.

Please note: In the conversations below, green represents an automated conversation, yellow represents a 1:1 conversation.

First, segment your client list to include women over the age of 50. Store this list in your CRM.

Next, create the conversational messages you want to send to these women. You can send a straightforward SMS text or include an image and/or video in an MMS message.

You can send as many messages in the automated flow as you want. At any point that your client replies with a keyword or specific request to your messages, SMS-Magic will alert your sales team for a rapid response.

Promote New Wellness Services

Getting your clients’ attention to announce new services isn’t always easy. Sure, you can put up signs in your office. And your emails don’t get much of a response. That’s where messaging comes in. Messages get 6X the responses of emails, so your clients will get your announcements.

Just as with product promotions, automating new service announcements is easy. You follow the same steps. All you have to do is change the message content. If we take the message flow above, and tune it for a new services offering, here’s how it looks.

When someone clicks the link to schedule, Kim’s schedule is updated, and the following series of scheduling and reminder messages is automatically sent to the client.

Promoting your healthcare related products and services has never been easier, or more effective at driving more revenue for your business.

Use SMS Messages to Prompt Automatic Re-orders

You can send automated reminders to your clients for reorders or for annual scheduled events. For example, a compounding pharmacy sends refill reminders to their clients who order 3 month supplies of their pharmaceutical compounds.

Reminders via SMS messages make it easier for your clients to remember to re-order important healthcare products. You remind them, and that makes them come back to you for more services.

The Bottom Line

Promoting wellness products and services with SMS messages from SMS-Magic makes your clients feel appreciated and special. It also makes it easier for you to create a stronger relationship with each and every client, thanks to a personalized conversation promoting offers just for them.

SMS messages offer a natural way to converse with your clients. When you regularly reach out with relevant tips and information, you create a stronger relationship with your clients. That trust makes them like you, and you’ll have the client relationship that’s so important.

It’s easy to create a set of tips for different client types, then automatically send them to your clients. Once you create the messages, you don’t have to do anything, until you want to add new tips or shift the ones you’re offering today.

Here’s how it works.

Please note that the green messages are automated workflows and the yellow messages are manual replies from your customer or from the SMS-Magic user stepping in to respond personally.

SMS Messages for General Wellness Tips

Let’s say you have a majority of clients who are generally healthy. Their primary interest is in maintaining their health through diet, exercise and proper supplements. Following are examples of the wellness tips you can share on a regular basis.

Whenever Kim sees a new article or video, she can simply create a message and add it to the conversation. It will be sent based on whatever schedule she’s set up. New clients start with the first message in the series, while current clients get regularly scheduled updates.

Text Messaging for Special Health Needs

Not all of your healthcare clients are equally healthy. Some have very specialized needs. Let’s take an example of Shari, an acupuncturist who works with a variety of clients.

Shari’s clients tend to fall into the following health categories:

• Healthy, interested in supplements.
• Respiratory issues, interested in supplements and alternative medicine.
• Overweight, interested in weight loss alternatives.
• Heart conditions, interested in heart health, diet and alternatives for healing.
• Athletes, interested in natural performance enhancement techniques.

For each of the above client types, Shari simply creates a first series of messages that contain wellness tips related to their specific condition. She can then schedule each message to be delivered to her specific clients, at a regular interval. Let’s say monthly.

Shari starts with three messages for each client type. That’s three months of regular tips. She then adds new messages as she finds appropriate techniques or tips for each client segment.

Her clients love the fact that Shari cares enough to give them special tips. They also appreciate the messages she sends since it’s so easy to read them and get to the content that’s always relevant to them.

Shari’s clients are now referring more new clients to her. When each new client first meets Shari, she assigns them to one of the wellness tip segments. They begin receiving the messages on a monthly basis, and like their friends, they really appreciate Shari.

Summary

One of the biggest complaints about healthcare providers is the lack of ongoing contact. Seems like we only hear from our providers when they can make money from a service.

Using SMS messages to share wellness tips is a powerful yet simple way to show your clients you care about them, their health and their well-being. It’s also a superb way to create deeper connections with your clients. After all, trust forms the foundation of a healthcare relationship.

Simple notifications can be easily communicated via SMS messages. For example, notifications and updates concerning lab work being back in the office, back-ordered supplements or products becoming available, new office hours, expanded services and more can all be easily communicated via text messaging.

Conversational text messaging from SMS-Magic helps improve patient communications across the globe for our healthcare-related customers. Patients actually read the notifications, thanks to the natural feel of text messaging, so they get your updates. Office staff saves time and frustration since they no longer have to make those repetitive, time consuming calls.

Following are a few examples of how you can use conversational text messaging to better communicate with your patients.

How to Send Real-time Updates with SMS Messages

Thanks to SMS-Magic’s seamless integration with CRM data, or your own database, you can automatically trigger real-time updates whenever new information is added to a patient’s record.

Please note that the green messages are automated workflows and the yellow messages are manual replies from your customer or from the SMS-Magic user stepping in to respond personally.

Let’s say your patient has had some lab work performed. When the results arrive, the patient’s record is updated. SMS-Magic automatically sends an update to the patient, letting them know that their results are back. You can also ask them to call the office directly for a secure discussion of the results, or automatically schedule an appointment.

You can also set up real-time alerts for back-ordered product availability, service updates (for example a new service offering,) or for any repetitive actions that your office staff needs to take manually.

When a patient replies with the HELP keyword, (or any keyword), SMS-Magic can immediately alert your office staff so that they can initiate a rapid response in a 1:1 conversation.

Summary

Patient communications have never been easier than they are with SMS messages. Your patients will appreciate the convenience messaging offers to them, and they’ll appreciate you for your quick updates and responses. You’ll take patient service to a whole new level with conversational text messaging. Your patients will love you for it.