iMessage for medical and dental practices

A missed dental appointment is an hour of chair time, a hygienist you are paying, and a patient whose treatment slips. Practices routinely run no-show rates in the teens, and reminders are the cheapest fix available. The complication is that you are messaging about health, and that pulls in rules most small businesses never have to think about.

The rule that shapes every template

Keep protected health information out of the message body. A text can say who you are, when the appointment is, and how to change it. It should not say what the appointment is for. 'Your appointment with Dr. Patel on Thursday at 2pm' is fine. 'Your root canal follow-up' is a detail visible on a lock screen in a waiting room, a shared kitchen, or a partner's hands.

export const practice = {
  reminder: (c: Ctx) =>
    `${c.practice}: appointment with ${c.provider} on ${c.dayDate} ` +
    `at ${c.time}. Reply C to confirm or call ${c.phone} to change it.`,
 
  // Detail lives behind authentication, never in the message.
  resultsReady: (c: Ctx) =>
    `${c.practice}: there's an update in your patient portal. ` +
    `Sign in to view: ${c.portalLink}`,
 
  formsNeeded: (c: Ctx) =>
    `${c.practice}: please complete your forms before ${c.dayDate} ` +
    `so we can start on time: ${c.formsLink}`,
};

Consent works differently here

Appointment reminders are generally treated as part of treatment and operations rather than marketing, which is why practices can send them. That latitude does not extend to promotions. A whitening special, a new-service announcement, or a membership plan pitch is marketing and needs the full marketing consent — see consent.

Give patients a documented way to opt out of texts specifically without opting out of being contacted at all. Someone who does not want texts still needs to hear from you about a rescheduled surgery.

Ask every vendor these three questions

1. 01Will you sign a business associate agreement? If a vendor handles anything that could constitute protected health information, you need one. Several messaging vendors will not sign, and that is a hard stop.
2. 02Where is message content stored, for how long, and can we set the retention? See data retention.
3. 03Who at your company can read our message content? Ask directly and get the answer in writing.

Start with reminders and confirmations only. Measure your no-show rate for eight weeks before and after — for most practices the recovered chair time pays for the channel several times over. How to run that calculation.