How to send a bulk SMS broadcast to patients | Front Desk Practice Management System

To send a bulk SMS message to a group of patients in Front Desk, start with creating an SMS template.

Go to System > Standard Messages > Standard SMS

Select Add

Enter a Description and customise the text that will be sent to your patients.

To send the message to patients, go to Reports > Patient List

Enable the appropriate filters if you wish to send the message to a subgroup of your patients. For example, to send the message to patients with appointments in the last few months, enable the ‘Appoint between’ filter and set the appropriate dates.

Select SMS on the right-hand side to continue.

Select your template from the drop-down list. Alternatively, you can compose the message ad-hoc in the Message textbox.

Select the Get Balance button after selecting your template to check how many credits your broadcast will require.

A single SMS credit allows for up to 160 characters. We encourage you to keep the character count within the 160 character limit to avoid consuming additional credits. If you have a lot of information to share, we strongly recommend using the SMS message to direct your patients to your website, where you can elaborate on the information you have to share with your patients. Short URL services such as http://bit.ly can help in keeping the website URL you include in your SMS as short as possible.

When you’re ready to send the SMS message, select the Send button.

Note that once received by our SMS gateway, bulk SMS are sent out individually to each patient due to the individual letter tags per message. For large volumes of SMS, this may take some time to complete, potentially up to a few hours. We do not advise scheduling bulk SMS to be sent late in the day as patients may receive them late into the evening.