I apoligize for creating two topics in a row but there might be people who will also find this thread useful.
My practice sends reminders to patients after 6 months from the last visit asking to book an appointment again. So my questions are:
Is it possible to automate this with OpenEMR? So the systems sends reminders to patients who visited us 6 months ago.
If yes, how will the system recognize when the patient was last in? Because right now I am thinking that the best way to book patients is using the calendar. Will reminding system correspond to the calendar or do I need to manually set the date for every patient when the reminder will be sent?
If the patients definitely need followup in 6 months, it’s a lot simpler to go ahead & schedule it at the time of the visit. Patients often attach the little appointment card to their calendar at home. This helps them to remember to keep the appointment.
For patients with faulty memories, staff can insert a note in “Comments” of the “Add Event” dialog to remind the patient with a phone call the day before.
Set a reminder to the appointment clerk for given date.
Create a issue and every day/week run report to pull up a list.
Learn ‘Rules’ feature - it may take few hours of trial and error. In the end emr will automatically send one liner reminder message to email address on file. If a patient does not want reminders, you can even turn the rule off for that specific patient.
‘Rules’ is also answer to your 2nd question. E.g. we do reminders for annual physicals which must be at least 365 days apart. So we have rules that look for billing codes and encounter dates to come up with interval considered by rules engine.
If you start using emails by ‘Rules’, look for patch we had contributed sometime ago that let’s you use detailed templates rather than 1 liners.