Appointment reminders are a feature we have developed to help GP practices and care providers improve appointment attendance and reduce DNA rates. Reminders can be enabled on a slot-type basis, providing you the ability to customise your patients' digital experience to match your practice needs.

When appointment reminders are enabled for a given slot-type, Hero will automatically detect appointments booked for the chosen slot type and send a reminder to the patient 24 hours before the appointment.

We recommend you should always enable appointment reminders for any slot type where the patient is required to attend an appointment, whether the appointment is face-to-face, by telephone or a video consultation.

This allows you to inform patients of upcoming appointments reducing the likelihood of the patient not attending.

If you have enabled online cancellation or rescheduling, the patient will also be able to cancel to reschedule the appointment online, without needing to manually contact the practice.

Before enabling appointment reminders we recommend creating a list of slot-types; including if they are delivered face-to-face, by telephone, or by video or if they admin slots (we also advise including the DNA rate for each type).

Once you have a list of all you slot types you will be able to see which slot-types need appointment reminders turned on.

You can now sign in to Hero and navigate to your slot-type (Settings > Appointment > Appointment types). From the list of slot types you can find the ones you want to enable reminders for and click Options -> Edit this will open the slot-type settings.

Once you have opened the slot-type settings you can navigate to the General tab and find section called Attendance.

Here you can select how the appointment will be delivery, this will be used when the appointment reminder content is dynamically generated.

After having selected the attendance type you can how the appointment reminder will be sent to the patient. Remaining on the General tab you can go to the Appointment reminder section and selected the channel.

For NHS practices:

Here you can select to send the reminder using:

For private practice:

Here you can select to send the reminder using:

Once you have selected the attendance method and the delivery channel you can simply click Save and this will automatically enable reminders for this slot type.