Medical Appointment Reminders Software

Self-scheduled appointments carry a risk of no-show just like manually booked ones. However, there are tactics you can use to reduce no-show rates to near zero.

1. Automated reminders - Most clinics have this in place, but it is the first step in addressing no-show rates — and in Cortico, reminders can cover appointments your staff booked directly in the EMR as well as ones booked online, once that setting is switched on
2. Advertise no-show fees (during booking). Advertising a no-show fee at the time the patient books online does wonders to motivate them (by setting a social contract) they agreed to. It’s often the social pressure and inconvenience of being chased for a no-show fee, as well as understanding the financial impetus for the clinic that motivates patient behaviour here as well.
3. Just let them cancel. If patients can’t make an appointment, the online reminder system should encourage them to cancel rather than no-show. If the patient can cancel easily, they’ll do so and another patient will fill their spot quickly (if you have automated online booking)
4. Automate no-show fee enforcement. When patient schedule their appointment, Cortico can automatically block them from booking if they have a pending no-show fee. This filters out the worst actors. We recommend this be done only for cases where the above actions don’t work, since it may restrict patient access to care (so, should be reserved for repeat offenders).

If you still have no-shows, consider:

1. Use patient scheduling software to allow self-cancellation instead of no-shows and auto-fill gaps.
2. Advertise a no-show fee during booking, and even consider automatically enforcing payment prior to new appointments being booked in Cortico.
3. Automatically pre-authorize the patient’s credit card in Cortico so they pay the fee automatically if appointment is missed.

A mixture of channels works best. This is the configuration we recommend:

1. Email reminders 7, 2, and 1 days in advance.
2. SMS reminder 90 minutes in advance.
3. Voice-call fallback for landlines. When an SMS reminder cannot be delivered because the number is not a mobile, Cortico calls the patient instead — a Premium option, off until you turn it on.
4. Email reminders should fall back to SMS for patients with no email address on file.
5. Allow patients to specify their reminder channel preferences, ensuring they receive it on their best channel.

Yes — Cortico syncs in real time with Accuro (COMPLETE), Juno EMR (COMPLETE), Oscar 19 (COMPLETE), WELL OscarPro (COMPLETE+), OpenOSP (COMPLETE+), and Flow EMR (COMPLETE+), and at the GOOD tier with Practice Fusion, NextGen Office, OpenEMR, Profile (Intrahealth), and MPeer. When a patient confirms or cancels from the link in an SMS or email reminder, the chart updates instantly — no double-entry.

Yes. Cortico is SOC 2 Type 2 certified, ISO 27001 certified, and fully compliant with PHIPA (Ontario), PIPEDA (Canada-wide), and HIPAA. All reminders and patient data are encrypted in transit and at rest, and Cortico is hosted in Canadian data centres.

Reminders, and the patient pages they link to, are sent in English, French, Simplified Chinese or Traditional Chinese. Farsi is selectable but only partly translated, and anything not yet translated shows in English. The patient chooses their language once in Cortico’s patient portal and every reminder after that goes out in it — Cortico stores that choice against the patient rather than reading it from a field in your EMR, so nothing has to be maintained on your side. Multi-language support is a per-clinic setting and is off until you turn it on. Automated voice-call reminders speak English or French only.

Cortico’s appointment reminders are included in every package. The Essentials package starts at $86/provider/month and includes appointment reminders, online booking, telehealth, secure patient messaging, and EMR integration. See pricing for full plan details.

A reminder your EMR sends is a notification. A Cortico reminder is a place the patient can act: it carries a secure link where they confirm, cancel, finish an outstanding intake form or join their video visit, and whatever they do writes straight back to the schedule, so nobody re-keys a cancellation. Cortico can also remind on appointments your staff booked in the EMR, not only ones patients booked online, so you do not have to move your booking to get the reminders.

Cortico calls them. When an SMS reminder cannot be delivered because the number is not a mobile, Cortico places an automated voice call that reads out the clinic, the provider, and the date and time of the appointment, and asks the patient to sign in and confirm. It runs as a fallback after the text fails rather than as a channel you schedule separately, so nobody gets both. It is a Premium option and is off until your clinic turns it on, and the call speaks English or French.

Yes — through a secure link rather than a plain text thread. The reminder is the notification; tapping the link opens Cortico’s secure patient portal, where the patient confirms, reschedules, fills an outstanding intake form, or messages the clinic, and the whole conversation is logged to the patient record. That is deliberate: carrier SMS and ordinary email are unencrypted and do not verify who is reading, so no clinical detail travels in the reminder itself. If a patient does text back, the number answers automatically to point them at their clinic’s secure sign-in page rather than leaving them waiting — it is a sending number, not a monitored inbox. STOP is the one word it acts on, and it opts the patient out of SMS reminders.

No. Reminder and clinical messaging to your patients is included at a flat rate, so reminders, confirmations and follow-ups do not run a meter and there are no per-message overages. The one message type that is priced per send is Mass Email, an à-la-carte broadcast add-on at $0.0025 per message — that is marketing volume, not appointment or clinical messaging.