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Send appointment reminders

Turn reminders on, pick how far ahead one gets sent, and record each patient's consent. One reminder per appointment.

3 min read Updated 29 September 2026
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A reminder gets sent by text before an appointment, once. Three things have to line up first: your practice has SMS switched on, the reminder itself is switched on, and the patient has agreed to receive reminders.

Turn on reminders

Settings → SMS notifications. Enable SMS notifications is the switch at the top and the rest of the screen appears behind it.

Appointment notifications is the card to look at. It has a switch each for a confirmation, a reschedule, a cancellation, a reminder and a follow-up, so a practice that wants only reminders can have only reminders.

Turn Appointment reminder on and a second control appears under it: how far ahead to send. The choices are 1, 2, 4, 12, 24 and 48 hours, and it starts at 24.

The hours selector only appears once the reminder itself is on.

Other notifications underneath covers prescriptions, lab results, payment reminders and the messages you send by hand. Those have their own switches and none of them is a reminder.

The practice-wide switch isn't consent, and no reminder reaches a patient who hasn't given it. Each patient agrees separately, and they agree per phone number.

Open the patient and go to Details → SMS & communications. The SMS consent card lists their numbers, and each one offers two ways forward. Ask by SMS texts them a link so they can agree themselves. Grant consent opens a dialog for recording agreement you already have, which is what its own note asks you to be sure of before you tick anything.

Each number has its own consent, and its own two buttons.

That dialog separates appointment notifications, reminders and general messages. Reminders are their own tick, so a patient can agree to hear from you and still not want the reminder.

When a reminder actually gets sent

Practor looks every fifteen minutes for appointments falling inside the window you chose, so a reminder arrives near that mark rather than exactly on it.

One reminder per appointment. Once it has sent, nothing sends again.

Five things stop one:

  • The appointment isn't Booked. A request still waiting for you to approve it gets nothing, and neither does one already arrived or cancelled.
  • There's no phone number on the patient's record.
  • The patient has a portal account, which is reminded a different way.
  • Messaging isn't funded, which What Practor costs covers.
  • It's outside your business hours, if you've turned that on.

Business hours is the card above Appointment notifications. Turn on Respect business hours and set a start and an end, and a reminder due outside those hours waits for the next one inside them rather than texting somebody at nine in the evening. Practor checks every fifteen minutes, so a held reminder gets sent soon after you open. A window whose end is before its start runs overnight, for a practice that works those hours.

That different way stops as soon as the patient has seen it: a notification in Practor first, an email half an hour later if the notification is still unread, and a text the day before only if it's unread even then. A visit booked less than 48 hours ahead gets no reminder at all, because they only just chose the time.

Change what a reminder says

Message templates at the foot of the same screen holds the wording of each message. They're written with placeholders that fill themselves in, so the patient's name, the date and the time come from the appointment rather than from you.

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