Messaging Campaigns

The right message at the right time for every purpose

A campaign is a collection of one or more messages that all have the same purpose, such as sending a last minute appointment reminder, or telling a patient that theyre coming due for their prophy. Campaigns store all of the logic thats built into Lighthouse PLZ Messaging what messages to send, when to send them, when to stop sending them, etc.

Select from the standard campaigns or contact us to create a customized campaign just for you. All of the messages in any single campaign are related to each other, thereby enabling the automatic cancellation of remaining messages once the campaigns purpose is satisfied (i.e., the appointment is confirmed or a recall appointment is scheduled).

A very detailed description of all the PLZ campaigns and their components follows. For a high level view of campaigns, click here.

Recall Campaigns

Figure 1

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Specific Purpose:
To remind a patient who doesn't have a recall appointment scheduled that they need to contact you to schedule one.

General Description:
Every active patient who is "on recall" and who doesn't have a recall appointment scheduled will have one or more of the following campaigns executed for them.

Individual Campaigns:

• RecallComingDue: Send an e-mail 3 weeks before patient's recall due date, followed by a postcard 1 week later if necessary (if a recall appointment isn't scheduled yet).
• RecallOneDayPastDue: Send e-mail 3 weeks after the due date, followed by a postcard 1 week later if necessary.
• RecallSixMonthsPastDue: Send e-mail 6 months (26 weeks) after due date, followed by a postcard 1 week later if necessary.
• RecallOneYearPastDue: Send e-mail 1 year (52 weeks) after due date, followed by a postcard 1 week later if necessary.

Campaign Variations:
If you want to send more recall reminders, or send them at different times than described above, or send a different combination of the types of messages than described above, you have to decide what you want to send and when you want to send them, then let us know. We'll make a custom version of the necessary Campaign (above) to use the schedule you want. (This might take us several days to do, depending on our workload. If you want, you can use the above schedule in the meantime, and within 4 weeks of us completing the customization, your messages will all be going according to your custom schedule.)

Campaign Relationships:
Every campaign consists of an e-mail followed 1 week later by a postcard. This gives the e-mail a chance to do its job (get the patient to schedule a recall appointment), which would prevent the cost of sending the postcard, but since it's very important to get patients to schedule recall, we don't rely on e-mail exclusively. e-mails are sent in addition to postcards, not instead of postcards, in case the patient never receives, reads or responds to the e-mail. Any remaining recall messages will be cancelled for the patient when they schedule a recall appointment, or if they're taken off recall or if they're inactivated. The appropriate Recall campaign will be scheduled for a patient if they cancel a recall appointment, if they're reactivated, or if they're put back "on recall" (if they had previously been taken "off recall").

Common Recall Schemes:
There's only one Scheme that's selected by the vast majority of practices: all of the above Campaigns with their default schedules. This results in an e-mail/postcard pair sent four times - a few weeks before the patient is due for recall, a few weeks after their due date, six months after their due date, and finally, a year after their due date.

What To Do / Not Do In Your PMS
If you choose not to send the postcards via Lighthouse PLZ Messaging, you'll need to have some manual system in your PMS for sending them, and you'll have to coordinate the timing of them to roughly follow the timing of the postcards in the campaigns you choose. This could be rather difficult to do consistenly, which is why we really recommend sending all of your recall messages via Lighthouse PLZ Messaging. For an office with one full time hygienist, where 75% of hygiene appointments are pre-scheduled, the "premium" for having Lighthouse PLZ Messaging send the postcards is less than $2 per week!

Currently, the Recall messages are intended to get the patient to call you to schedule an appointment. When they do, and you make the appointment, that will automatically cancel any remaining Recall messages for that patient. (Eventually, we hope to be able to direct them to your Lighthouse Portal (website) where they can login and actually schedule an appointment from those offered to them by the system - but not yet.)

Appointment Reminder Campaigns

There are four different Campaign Types that are appointment-related, and every office will use one, two, three or all four of them to create their Appointment Reminder Scheme. Each of the Campaign Types is detailed below, followed by some recommendations on assembling campaigns into a Scheme that works for you.

• Save the Date
• Long Term Reminders
• Short Term Confirmation
• Last Minute Reminders
• Selecting Your Appointment Campaign Configuration
• Preventing Messages for a Single Appointment or a Group of Appointments

The Standard Appointment Reminder Scheme

While you can deviate from the standard Scheme, most offices won't. We've spent a LOT of time designing it, gotten input from a lot of testing offices, and tweaked it over many months to make it as efficient and effective as we believe it can be. It's probably quite different from what you've always done before to remind patients of upcoming appointments, but that's primarily because YOU are limited in what you can do in your PMS, and we were NOT limited in what we can do - so we didn't have any artificial constraints! A "clean sheet of paper" is a beautiful thing when designing a new system.

Doctor vs. Hygiene Appointments:
It's easiest to think of Appointment Reminder Campaigns based on time - the amount of time between the making of the appointment and the appointment itself. We'll call that the "scheduling interval." In a typical office, there are two general types of appointments, each with its own typical scheduling interval: doctor appointments are typically made in the fairly near future (the scheduling interval is less than a month), and hygiene appointments are typically made with about a six month scheduling interval. Of course, there are exceptions in each case, which leads us to the first significant enhancement in Lighthouse PLZ Messaging vs. your current system: Lighthouse PLZ Messaging is not concerned with the type of appointment (doctor or hygiene), but only with the scheduling interval! All appointments are important - in fact, doctor appointments typically have significantly higher production value than hygiene appointments, so from a purely financial standpoint, doctor appointments are more important. A doctor appointment made six weeks in the future has just as much chance of being forgotton as a hygiene appointment made six weeks in the future, we we treat them exactly the same.

Figure 2 - Appointments with a Scheduling Interval of more than 30 days: This is what the schedule of messages looks like for any appointment made more than 30 days in the future. A few things to note:

• There's only a single postcard per appointment, so a patient without e-mail or cell phone will get only one reminder (probably what you've been doing all along).
• There's only a single SMS (cell phone text message) per appointment.
• Only 3 messages will be sent if the patient replies to the e-mails we send. (See the * items.)
• All of these messages except the Last Minute Reminders are cancelled as soon as the appointment is confirmed.
• The Last Minute Reminders are cancelled if the appointment is confirmed within 12 hours of the appointment.

Figure 2

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Figure 3 - Appointments with Scheduling Interval more than 7 days and less than 31 days: This is what the schedule looks like for any appointment made more than 7 days in the future, but less than 31 days in the future. A few things to note:

• There are no postcards in this scenario, so a patient without e-mail or cell phone won't get any reminders.
• There's only a single SMS (cell phone text message) per appointment.
• Only 2 messages will be sent if the patient replies to the e-mails we send. (See the * items.)
• All of these messages except the Last Minute Reminders are cancelled as soon as the appointment is confirmed.
• The Last Minute Reminders are cancelled if the appointment is confirmed within 12 hours of the appointment

Figure 3

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Figure 4 - Appointments with Scheduling Interval more than 12 hours and less than 8 days: This is what the schedule looks like for any appointment made more than 12 hours in the future, but less than 8 days in the future. A few things to note:

• There are no postcards in this scenario, so a patient without e-mail or cell phone won't get any reminders.
• There's only a single SMS (cell phone text message) per appointment.
• Only 2 messages will be sent if the patient replies to the e-mails we send. (See the * items.)
• All of these messages except the Last Minute Reminders are cancelled as soon as the appointment is confirmed.
• The Last Minute Reminders are cancelled if the appointment is confirmed within 12 hours of the appointment

Figure 4

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Now that you can see how all the campaigns are used, let's see what they all do, and how they all work, in detail.

Save-the-date campaign

Specific Purpose:
To remind patients to put a just-scheduled appointment on their calendar, so they can reschedule it if they have a conflict they forgot about when they made the appointment, and so they won't schedule anything else that will conflict with it.

Secondary purpose, for the "mid-term" Save The Date only:
To get the patient to confirm the appointment, so we don't have to call them on the phone a few days before the appointment.

General description:
Send an e-mail just after each appointment is scheduled. Since most offices hand the patient an appointment card when an appointment is made, and will use some kind of reminder a few days before the appointment, this isn't a necessary message, only a nicety. So it will be sent only to patients with e-mail, because e-mail is free.


Campaign details:
Send an e-mail 1 hour after the appointment is scheduled. One of the three Save the Date messages will be sent for any appointment made more than 12 hours in advance.

Replies:
The embedded replies differ, depending on how far in advance the appointment is scheduled:

Scheduled more than 30 days from now (Long Term Save The Date)

• "It's on my calendar" (Doesn't affect any other campaigns)
• "I have a problem with this appointment. Please contact me." (Doesn't affect any other campaigns)

Scheduled 8 - 30 days from now (Mid Term Save The Date)

• "It's on my calendar, but please e-mail me again a few days before the appointment" (Doesn't affect any other campaigns)
• "I'll be there - I don't need another reminder" (Cancels the ShortTermConfirm Campaign, described below, and marks the appointment "Confirmed" in your PMS)
• "I have a problem with this appointment. Please contact me." (Doesn't affect any other campaigns)

Scheduled 12 hours to 7 days from now (Short Term Save The Date)

• "I'll be there." (The text of the message tells the patient to call you if they have a conflict.) (Doesn't affect any other campaigns, but marks the appointment "Confirmed" in your PMS)

Long-term Reminder Campaign

Specific Purpose:
to remind patients of appointments they scheduled at least a month in advance, to make sure they don't have any conflicts that didn't exist when the appointment was scheduled, or to get them to reschedule if they do have conflicts. These are especially useful for hygiene appointments scheduled months in advance, but are equally effective for any type of appointment scheduled more than a month in advance.

Secondary purpose:
to confirm as many appointments as possible, to prevent as many outbound confirmation phone calls as possible

General description:
Send 1, 2 or 3 messages 1 to 2 1/2 weeks before the appointment.

Campaign details:
Send an e-mail 2 weeks and 4 days before the appointment, followed by a postcard 2 weeks before the appointment, followed by an e-mail 1 week before the appointment. At any point, marking the appointment "Confirmed" in your PMS will cancel any remaining messages in the Campaign. (Ideally, it will be confirmed by an embedded reply in the first e-mail, because that will prevent the cost of sending the postcard.) This campaign is scheduled only for appointments made more than 30 days in advance.

Replies:

• "It's on my calendar, but please e-mail me again a few days before the appointment" (Cancels any remaining messages in this Campaign, but does not cancel the ShortTermConfirmCampaign, below.)
• "I'll be there - I don't need another reminder" (Cancels any remaining messages in this Campaign, and cancels the ShortTermConfirm Campaign.)
• "I have a problem with this appointment. Please contact me." (Cancel any remaining messages in this Campaign.)

Relationships:
Marking the appointment "confirmed" in the PMS at any time will cancel any remaining messages in this campaign. Message #1, the 2 1/2 week e-mail, has an embedded reply that says "Yes, I'll be there" and another that says "Yes, I'll be there - but would you please e-mail me again a few days before the appointment?" The first of these replies cancels the rest of the Long Term Reminder messages AND cancels the Short Term Confirmation campaign (below), leaving only the Last Minute Reminder campaign. The second of these replies cancels the rest of the Long Term Reminder messagess, but does NOT cancel the Short Term Confirmation campaign nor the Last Minute Reminder campaign.

Short-term confirmation campaign

Specific purpose:
To remind patients of an appointment they have a few days from now, to reduce the number of outbound confirmation telephone calls you have to make.

General description:
Send an e-mail 2 - 4 business days before the appointment for every appointment still not marked as "confirmed" in the PMS. If the Long Term Reminder campaign was successful, most appointments should arleady be confirmed by this time. Only those patients who have ignored the Long Term Reminder e-mails and postcard, and those who specifically requested this short term reminder, will get this e-mail.

Campaign details:
Send an e-mail 2 - 4 business days before the appointment. This is dependent on the day of the week of the appointment. Because of the weekend, we've made separate campaigns for Monday appointments, Tuesday appointments and Wednesday-Saturday appointments. If you don't work on Fridays, for example, you might want to confirm your Monday and Tuesday appointments on Thursday, so the e-mails will be configured to be sent early in the morning on Wednesday, to give the patient all day to read and reply, to prevent the outbound phone call on Thursday. (This will be discussed with you during the initial setup of LHM in your office.)

One of the Short Term Confirmation Campaigns will be scheduled for any appointment made more than 7 days in advance, but (as per the previous paragraph) will be cancelled if the patient clicks on the "Yes, I'll be there" reply in the Long Term Reminder e-mail.

Replies:
There's only one - "Yes, I'll be there." The text of the messages says the patient needs to call you if they're not going to click on that reply.

Last minute reminder campaign

Specific purpose:
To prevent failed appointments that occur simply because the patient forgets about the appointment just prior to the appointment time.

General description:
Send an e-mail and/or an SMS a few hours before the appointment.

Campaign details:
Send an e-mail 2 hours before the appointment, followed by an SMS 1 hour before the appointment if necessary. Scheduled for any appointment made more than 12 hours in advance.

Relationships:
The 2 hour e-mail has an embedded reply that says "Yes, I'll be there." If the patient clicks on it, it will cancel the 1 hour SMS. This campaign is independent of all other appointment-related campaigns (Save the Date, Long Term Reminder and Confirmation). i.e., even if a patient confirms their appointment from the Confirmation e-mail a day before the appointment, they're still going to get these messages.

Birthday Greetings Campaign

Figure 1


Specific Purpose:
To wish each patient a happy birthday!.

General Description:
Every patient who been seen for any reason in the past two years and who has not been marked inactive in the PMS will have the Birthday Greeting campaign scheduled for them.

Campaign Variations:

• You can send a postcard to every eligible patient.
• You can send an e-mail to every eligible patient who has e-mail.
• You can send an e-mail to every eligible patient who has e-mail, and a postcard to every eligible patient who doesn't have e-mail.
• You can send an SMS (text message) to every patient who has a cell phone.