Patient reminders

A reminder sends a patient a message ahead of an upcoming encounter, by text message, by email, or by both. Open Settings → Patient Reminders to work with them.

The Reminders section lists what the account holds. Each row shows the reminder’s name over its scope, its lead time and its channels, with Active or Inactive on the right. The Patients section leads to the coverage screen, summarized as counts of patients receiving, not receiving and without contact.

Two reminders arrive with the account, 3 days before and 1 hour before, in the account language. Both start Inactive, so nothing reaches a patient before the wording has been read and switched on.

Write a reminder

1. Choose Add reminder, or open an existing row to edit it.
2. Under Trigger, enter a Name. It labels the reminder in the list and is not shown to patients.
3. Set Applies to: One-off appointments, Recurring appointments, or All appointments.
4. Set Send. Lead time runs from 15 minutes before to 1 week before, picked from 15 and 30 minutes, 1, 2, 3, 6 and 12 hours, and 1, 2, 3 and 7 days.
5. Under Channels, switch on Text message, Email, or both, and write the Text body of each. Email also takes a Subject. At least one channel is required, and email will not save without its subject.
6. Read the Preview under each body: the text message as a phone shows it, and the email as an inbox shows it, both with the placeholders filled in and the sender line the patient will see.
7. Switch on Active once the wording is right, then save.

An account keeps at most 5 reminders, and Add reminder stops being offered at that point. Deleting a reminder from its editor also cancels the messages already queued for it.

Placeholders

Write a placeholder into a subject or a body and it is filled in per patient as each message goes out.

Placeholder	Fills in
{patientName}	the patient’s name
{practitionerName}	the practitioner’s name, titled as it will send
{when}	day, month and time of the encounter
{date}	day and month of the encounter
{time}	time of the encounter
{timeUntil}	how long until the encounter, as in “in 3 days”

Portuguese aliases are accepted and interchangeable: {nomePaciente}, {nomeProfissional}, {quando}, {data}, {hora} and {tempoRestante}. Storage always holds the canonical English keys, so a template written in one language keeps rendering after the account language changes.

A marker outside this set is rejected on save as Unknown marker, with the offending name. The preview renders the same text that will send, so a mistyped marker shows up verbatim there first.

Limits on what goes out

• A text body holds up to 320 characters and an email body up to 2000. A counter under each field tracks the length as it is typed.
• Text messages go out only between 08:00 and 21:00, local to the encounter’s own time zone.
• Text messages are one-way: patients cannot reply to them, so ask them to get in touch as usual.
• Email arrives from Maestra <[email protected]>, a send-only address. The practitioner’s own address is not exposed to patients.
• Reminders are scheduled 30 days ahead. An encounter further out is picked up on a later sync.

Choose which patients receive messages

A patient receives reminders once a contact on that patient is flagged as the one that receives messages. Only a mobile number can carry text messages, so a landline is never offered.

1. Open a patient and choose the messages action in the patient header.
2. Switch on the phone number or the email address to reach that patient at. One contact holds each channel, so switching a contact on releases whichever sibling held it.
3. Confirm the attestation that the patient agreed to receive messages at that number or address. The date consent was recorded is stored with the contact.

A flagged contact carries a bell badge wherever it appears, in the patient’s Record and in the edit form.

The coverage screen

Settings → Patient Reminders → Patients groups every patient into three segments, switched with the chips at the top:

• Receiving, with the flagged phone number, the flagged email address, or both.
• Not receiving, having a usable contact that is not flagged.
• Missing contact, having no mobile number and no email address. Selection is hidden here, because a switch could not reach these patients.

Choose Select to enrol or unenrol several patients at once, then Select All if the whole segment applies, and Turn on or Turn off. Both ask for confirmation and name the count first. Switching on picks the earliest-created mobile number and the earliest-created email address per patient, stamps consent, and skips any patient that already has a flagged contact of that kind; switching off clears every flagged contact those patients hold. At most 500 patients are updated in one pass.

Plans

The settings screen reads on any plan, so the reminders and the coverage counts are visible without a subscription. Creating, editing, reordering and deleting a reminder needs Maestra Pro, as does flagging a contact, one patient at a time or in bulk.

Caution

Reminders are the one feature that sends a message to a patient, so the boundary is worth stating plainly. A reminder body is sealed on the device before the relay ever sees it, and the relay unseals it only to hand the message to the SMS or email carrier. The carrier therefore does see the message, which is why reminders are not zero-knowledge end to end. What leaves is what was written into the reminder plus the placeholders it fills in, and nothing else.