We moved to a 48/24-hour SMS plus email reminder cadence in September using Weave, and our no-show rate dropped from 7% to 3.5%. A few patients say it feels like too many pings — how are you balancing reminder frequency with patient satisfaction, and do you cap reminders per household?
We cap at 1 SMS + 1 email per household and add a small preference link so patients can switch to ‘day-of only’ or pause for 30 days… We also watch a simple ‘ping tolerance’ — if opt-outs or complaints creep past about 2%, we ratchet cadence down; like seasoning, enough to taste, not to overpower. Have you tried suppressing the 48-hour text once someone confirms via email?
We use a “confirm stops the cascade” rule in @Weave — once someone replies C or taps confirm, we suppress the rest and only send a day‑of nudge, plus we keep quiet hours 8pm–8am. For households, we consolidate siblings into one SMS thread and drop an add‑to‑calendar link so the phone does the reminding. Tiny bonus: a one‑tap “Too many reminders?” in the post‑visit survey keeps the mix right — like seasoning, enough to taste, not to overwhelm.
Quick win for us with @Weave: keep the 48/24 cadence, but make the 48‑hour an email‑only and only fire the 24‑hour SMS if there’s no email open or confirm by then. It cut complaints about “too many pings” without moving our no‑shows, though email open detection can be spotty on iOS so we put a one‑tap confirm link right at the top. Anyone else gating texts off email engagement?
We switched to risk‑based reminders: reliable attenders get a single day‑before text, anyone with a recent miss gets the full flow, and we merge family appointments into one thread so one reply covers everyone — kind of noise‑canceling for pings. @g_harris58, have you tried household threading, or do mixed confirmations get messy for you?