Mosio is a messaging service specifically tailored for REDCap users, allowing for automated survey invites, alerts, and survey invitations via SMS/text messaging. Mosio is available for project teams through a monthly subscription model. For more information about the subscription plans and how to get an account, please read Getting a Mosio Account.
This article will provide you with an overview of how to configure appointment reminders. The appointment reminder functionality is made available to all Mosio accounts with at least a Basic plan.
If you want to learn about how to schedule appointment reminders (in REDCap or Mosio's user interface), see the following article: Scheduling Appointment Reminders.
Jump to:
Initially Configuring a Mosio Appointment Reminder
From your Mosio project dashboard, click on the "Overview" hyperlink, within your "Appointments" tile.
This page will display all existing reminders. You can also click the "Appointments" dropdown from the top of the page, and select the "Add New Configuration" option to begin configuring a new reminder.
A new pop-up window will generate where you can generate a name for this reminder/configuration. This will only seen by those within your Mosio project - it is not a participant facing label.
After you have written a name for the configuration, click the "Add New Configuration" button.
The new page you will load onto will be where you perform the initial configuration of your reminder.
In Step 1 of the configuration process., you can determine when you would like the reminder to be sent relative to the appointment date. You may select either the same day as the appointment, or up to 7 days in advance. Additionally, you can define the time you would like the reminder to send.
In Step 2, you can specify who will be notified if a participant responds to the appointment reminder sent to them.
You can enter multiple email addresses if you want to notify multiple staff members, you will just need to separate each email address with a comma (as seen in the screenshot below)
You may also specify if you would like to receive a notification ONLY in cases where a participant declines the appointment, or a notification if they confirm or decline the appointment.
Step 3 is where you will set up the message your participant will receive in the reminder, along with automatic responses to different participant inputs to the reminder. Your first option is to define the text in the initial appointment reminder. You may include [FIRSTNAME], [DATE], and [TIME] within the reminder to customize the message (assuming this information has been entered for the participant).
All Mosio appointment reminders will interact with a few keywords. By default, the participant can respond "Y" to confirm the appointment, N to cancel the appointment, and STOP to stop receiving SMS messages from the current Mosio project. We highly recommend including this information in the reminder text you share with the participant to ensure they're able to interact with the reminder.
The remaining customization options will determine what participants will see in response to the previously mentioned keywords. If you would like to modify the text that appears when a participant confirms the appointment by replying with a Y, you would want to edit the "Confirmation" text.
To modify the text that appears when a participant cancels the appointment by replying with an N, you would want to update the "Decline" text.
If a participant replies with something other than "Y", "N", or "STOP", they will receive an error message. You can specify what the error message they will receive is in the textbox labeled "Error".
Beyond the initial configuration, there are advanced configuration settings which can be accessed by clicking the "[ SHOW ]" text on the webpage.
In the advanced configuration options, we have the ability to chain other reminders by using the "Set additional reminders" section. This means that we can actually merge another reminder to act like an extension of the one we are currently designing/editing. This allows us to develop a schedule of reoccurring reminders for a participant. Please note that this will only work if you have already configured a second reminder.
In the example below, the project has a reminder named, "3 Days Before" which is configured to send at 8:00AM, three days before an appointment date. Since I want these to be linked to the same appointment (and the same participant cancellation trigger), I would select the "3 Days Before" reminder from the provided dropdown. Then, I would click the "+ Add" button.
After a reminder has successfully been chained to another, you will see the name of the reminder listed above the dropdown
Finally, clicking the "Save" button under Step 5: Save will save this configuration.
One last setting you may wish to configure before saving appears underneath the save button and is not assigned a step number. There is an "Unresponsive Participant Actions" section, which will allow you to configure specific behavior to occur if the participant does not respond to the Appointment Reminder. To start configuring one of these unresponsive actions to your appointment reminder, click the green "+ Add Unresponsive" button.
This will generate a new menu.
The hours field will be used to define how many hours AFTER the initial reminder this action should be taken. This can be used with decimals to capture smaller increments of time.
From the "Action" dropdown, you will have 3 selection options, with the default being "Alert".
An alert will send an additional message to your participant - that message will be defined in the provided "Value" field.
If you select "Email Admin", you will receive a new set of fields to define an email address and the body of email.
This can be used to alert someone else that the appointment reminder has not yet received a response.
Finally, the "Complete" action just means the appointment reminder will be considered complete if no response is received, changing the status of the reminder within other views of appointment reminders. Aside from hours, no additional fields will need to be defined.
You can set up multiple unresponsive actions by using the "+ Add Unresponsive" button after defining each new action.
Be sure to click the "Save" button in Step 5 to ensure these actions are added to the appointment reminder configuration.
How to Modify an Existing Appointment Reminder
If you would like to update any of the settings for an existing appointment reminder, you will need to start on your Mosio project dashboard, click on the "Overview" hyperlink, within your "Appointments" tile.
When accessing this page, you will see a list of all the appoint reminders currently configured on your project. Click on the name of the reminder you would like to modify.
On the new page, you can click the "Appointment Settings" tab, towards the top of the page.
This will bring you to the same configuration page described in the instructions for the initial configuration. If you would like to learn more about each setting, view the Initially Configuring a Mosio Appointment Reminder section of this article.
Next Up
Learn to start scheduling appointment reminders for your participants in Scheduling Appointment Reminders.