Sometimes, a patient will give you an incorrect phone number, or their phone number will change without them notifying you, or maybe your staff mistyped the phone number. There are a few reasons that you might be sending a reminder call or text to the wrong person. This article will help you find which patient has been assigned the wrong phone number and get it corrected in your main system.
IMPORTANT: You'll want to quickly find out which patient has the wrong phone number for 2 reasons: (1) You do not want to bother people who are not your patients, (2) Your correct patients are not receiving reminders, and (3) you do not want to tell non-patients who your patients are.
NOTE: You might be able to quickly locate the patient in question if you log into 1-800 Notify and check the reminders sent out for the day when the person received the incorrect call or text. However, if you have many locations and the person doesn't call you until days later, you'll need to use the approach shown below.
TIP: While you are working on finding this information, you could set up a DO NOT CONTACT (do-not-call and do-not-text) for the incorrect phone number by using this related article so the wrong person does not receive another call or text by mistake.
STEP 1: Export data for a date range from your account.
Use this related article to pull out a range of data from your account. We'd recommend doing a few weeks back up to and including today's date. See this article.
STEP 2: Open the exported file in a spreadsheet, such as Microsoft Excel.
Use the spreadsheet Find (search) function to locate the phone number in question.
IMPORTANT: Remove all formatting (spaces, dashes and "( )") from the phone number when you search for it.
Example, you need to search for 3135551111 instead of 313-555-1111 or (313) 555-1111 or 313 555 1111.
Column D ("phone") is the column holding phone numbers used to send out phone calls.
Column T ("patient_mobile") is the column used for sending out text messages.
That search will show you if you ever sent a call or text to the wrong phone number in question. Then you can look in Column C to see the name of the patient that had the incorrect phone number and also look at column E and F to see the date and time of that patient's appointment.
STEP 3: Locate the patient in your own scheduling system and correct the phone number.
3.1 Look up the patient in question with the wrong phone number.
NOTE: The phone number received by 1800 Notify to send the reminder was in your scheduling system AT THE TIME you sent us the data to send the reminders. Someone else in your organization might have already changed/corrected the phone number in your system since that data was sent to 1800 Notify.
3.2 Correct the phone number in your system.
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