InphoniteVoice Feature of the Week

The use of text alerts is growing in popularity in healthcare, not only for appointment reminders, but also for disease management and medication compliance reminders.

InphoniteVoice supports SMS notification. There are at least three ways this can be accomplished with an on-premise edition of InphoniteVoice:

• Via Email
  For the major wireless carriers, you can send a text message by sending an email to the right email address. This was described in a previous blog post for ReminderPro.The price is right for this method. However if you do not know the carrier for each cell phone, this can result in the creation of a lot of unnecessary email messages.

• Via a Windows Mobile 6.x Device
  A Windows Mobile 6.x device can be configured to function as an SMS gateway. Obviously, utilizing an unlimited text messaging plan is the way to go with this scenario. InphoniteVoice must be configured to communicate with the Windows Mobile 6.x device.

• Via the Clickatell SMS gateway
  With the Clickatell SMS Gateway, a customer can send text messages via InphoniteVoice. (InphoniteVoice SaaS utilizes the Clickatell SMS Gateway for SMS notification.) Once configured, you simply need a list of cell phone numbers in order to send SMS messages. Clickatell charges roughly two cents per text message.

It is important to let patients know that they could be charged by their provider for receiving text messages.

Click on SMS reminders for a related Wiki article regarding this IVR functionality.

Next Week's InphoniteVoice Feature: Startup Wizard.