Cant get appointment reminders to work

larssle wrote on Thursday, December 01, 2016:

Hi guys,
I am new to OpenEMR, but I hope to get a little help from you guys.
I have configured the email-settings in Administration → Global → Notifications, and I have made an appointment for a patient. But no reminders are sent to the patient.
When going to the patients site, it says “No active patient reminders.” under Patient Reminders, but on the right, the appointment is visible as on this image:

What am I missing out here?

Best reg.
Lars

cmswest wrote on Friday, December 02, 2016:

hi Lars, are you running Windows or Linux?

hitechelp wrote on Friday, December 02, 2016:

He Lars,

Check these;
SMS enabled in Demographics/Choices.
Global settings for proper SMS acct data and Time of Appt. vs how far in
advance to send SMS.
SMS provider acct settings.
Check your cron log & Apache error log.

Good luck.

Regards,
David

On Dec 1, 2016 6:13 AM, “Lars” larssle@users.sf.net wrote:

Hi guys,
I am new to OpenEMR, but I hope to get a little help from you guys.
I have configured the email-settings in Administration → Global →
Notifications, and I have made an appointment for a patient. But no
reminders are sent to the patient.
When going to the patients site, it says “No active patient reminders.”
under Patient Reminders, but on the right, the appointment is visible as on
this image:

What am I missing out here?

Best reg.
Lars

Cant get appointment reminders to work
https://sourceforge.net/p/openemr/discussion/202505/thread/12a692a3/?limit=25#277d

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larssle wrote on Friday, December 02, 2016:

Hi Stephen,
Thank you for responding!
I am running Linux on a hosted server with php 7.0. Here are my php-settings:

larssle wrote on Friday, December 02, 2016:

Hi David,
Thank you for responding.
Eventually I want to use use Twilio for sms reminders. But at the moment I just want to send e-mail reminders, because I gues that will be first step.
Obviosly the reminders will not be send, if the email settings in Administrator is not set correctly. But do you need to do any thing to make the reminders show in “Patient reminders” in the costumer page as in the image in my first post?

larssle wrote on Friday, December 02, 2016:

By the way, if any one in here just LOVES troubleshooting, Ill have no problem giving full access to cpanel and the the OpenEMR back end. The domain is for testing only.

medfetch wrote on Saturday, December 03, 2016:

Hi Lars,
I know others have gotten these reminders to work but I find the options limited. I am currently working on writing something that will make reminders easier out-of-the-box for a non-programmer to deploy. I approach these things from a user-perspective and writing the code takes me forever so please be patient.

This new code piggy backs off the message center (which also needs an overhaul). Here are some of the things that the code will do:

  1. Link to SMS and automated Voice Message (aVM) Providers
  2. Callback notifications of patient responses from outside SMS and aVM providers
  3. Print Postcard Reminders/Recalls locally (or remotely - there are vendors for this too!)
  4. Print address labels if you have supplies for reminders already.
  5. Maintain a Recall List (eg. patients who need appt in 1 year but don’t want to book now)
  6. Custom E-Mails allowing you to add logos and HTML mark-up to make the reminder e-mails not just function but look good too according to your brand/style.
  7. Dashboard to display what has transpired (SMS-aVM-Email-Postcard-Label) and which patients need a manual recall (ie. staff picks up the phone and reminds the patient personally)
  8. Preferences to determine work-flows - which patients gets what when and how

I write code at a snail’s pace, two finger typing and all that jazz. Once I have it working for my office, I will be able to move it out with the intention of getting it reviewed for the codebase. It will take some time but I must admit it has been fun getting the asterisk servers up and running and hearing my cell phone ring with a nice pleasant voice from the free GoogleText to Speech engine (multi-language too!) saying I have an appointment…

More to come!
Ray

larssle wrote on Saturday, December 03, 2016:

Hi Ray,
Thank you for responding.
That does sound like the out-of-the-box-solution that would do the trick for me.
But for now, it would be nice just to be able to have a php/mysql-template and instrucions to set up a cron job to do the work like 24 hours before the scheduled appointment.
But I look very much forward to see the result of you work. Sounds like a good project.
Best reg.
Lars

bradymiller wrote on Sunday, December 04, 2016:

Hi,

Ray’s plan sounds awesome and agree with the modular approach. The current Patient Reminders stuff is geared towards clinical reminders (ie. mammogram reminders etc.) and not working for appointment reminders; this could be added but would be awkward(the clinical decision rules engine is quite a beast of code to work in), and I think Ray’s approach makes much more sense. The current method of sending appt reminders seems very disjointed and tough to get working, so looking very forward to Ray’s work :slight_smile:

Here’s a recent thread regarding appointment reminders:
https://sourceforge.net/p/openemr/discussion/202505/thread/fce25bc3/

And here’s a wiki page regarding this:
http://www.open-emr.org/wiki/index.php/Sms_and_Email_Notification_Howtos

-brady
OpenEMR