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 schedule appointment reminders (in REDCap or Mosio's user interface). 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 configure/modify existing appointment reminders, see the following article: Configuring Appointment Reminders
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Schedule Appointment Reminders Manually in Mosio
Once an appointment reminder has been configured in your Mosio project, you can begin to schedule these reminders in advance. To do this, click the "Schedule new appointment" text found in the "Appointments" tile on your Mosio project dashboard.
This will take you to the first appointment reminder you have configured based on alphanumerical sorting. Alternatively, you may use the "Appointments" dropdown menu from your Mosio project dashboard and select a specific reminder.
Once you have taken one of these actions, you will see the "Schedule and Monitor" overview of a given appointment reminder. From here, you will want to click on the "Create New Appointment Reminder" button.
This will always generate three fields - "Appointment Date/Time", "Participant ID", "Phone", and "Reminder Message". The reminder message will match the message defined in your appointment reminder's configuration. If you have any custom variables on the project, these will appear as well. In the following example, I have a "Coordinator name" and an "Enroll Date" variable configured on the project.
The Participant ID field, along with the magnifying glass to the right of it, can be used to generate the phone number, along with custom variables that currently have data in the project.
Clicking the magnifying glass after entering an existing participant ID will result in the following information being pulled into the other fields.
Clicking on the blank space in the "Appointment Date/Time" field will generate a calendar and clock that can be used to generate the date of the appointment, which will interact with the schedule send times set when configuring an appointment reminder.
Once all desired selections have been made, click the green "Schedule" button to finish the scheduling process. If the date of the appointment is within the filters defined in the "Monitor" window below, you will be able to see the newly scheduled reminder in the below.
Schedule an Appointment Reminder from REDCap
Mosio offers a "tag" feature, which can be used to transport information into Mosio from REDCap using specific phrases within a REDCap alert.
To start, you will want to create appointment date/time fields within REDCap. These fields will be used to determine what date the appointment reminder is referencing.
First, head to the Online Designer, which can be accessed by clicking the "Designer" hyperlink on the left-hand sidebar, underneath the "Project Home and Design" heading.
From here, identify the instrument where you would like to place the dates that will be used for the appointment reminder. This may be an existing instrument, or a new instrument. In the example provided on screen, an instrument titled, "Create Appointment Reminders" was created. Click on the name of the instrument on the designer page to continue.
Next, click the "Add field" button.
In the new pop-up window, click on the "Field Type" dropdown menu, and select the "Text Box (Short Text, Number, Date/Time, ...)" option.
After you have selected your field type, enter a variable name (something easy to reference, such as appt1_date). Then, click on the "Validation" dropdown menu, and select the "Y-M-D H:M" time option from this dropdown. You should also create a field label so data entry staff/participants can easily identify the use of the field. Note: At the time of writing this article, "M-D-Y H:M" formatting will not work when creating appointment reminders via REDCap.
Once these fields have been set, click the "Save" button.
You may wish to repeat this process for multiple fields if you intend to generate multiple appointment reminders with different dates on a record.
You may also wish to create an additional "helper" field to schedule the appointments. In the example used in this article, we are using a field with the following configuration to trigger the logic causing the appointment reminders to schedule.
The following screenshot provides an overview of all the appointment fields we have created for this article:
This is not a necessary step, and you could use form/survey completion status as your trigger logic. The most appropriate option for your project will be dependent on your overall intent with this design.
Now that our instrument/fields have been created, click on the "Alerts & Notifications" hyperlink on your left-hand sidebar, underneath the "Applications" heading.
On the new page, click the green "+ Add New Alert" button.
We will not provide a comprehensive coverage of how each alert feature works within this article, but we will summarize choices that will be relevant to linking the appointment reminder. If you would like to learn more about alerts, see the following article: Alerts & Notifications
Once the new pop-up window has opened, defined the conditions under which you would like the appointment reminder to be created within Mosio. In this alert, I am going to define the condition that my "appointment_trigger" field has the "1, Appointment 1" response option selected. Since we want to schedule the appointment reminder as soon as possible, I will not modify the default values for Step 2.
In Step 3 of the alert, I will select the "SMS Text Message" option for "Alert Type" and select one of the phone number fields associated with the record in Mosio for the "Recipient phone number(s)" field.
At this point, I will need to identify which appointment reminder I am linking this notification to. To do this, I'll open my Mosio project dashboard in another tab.
From your Mosio project dashboard, click on the "Overview" hyperlink, within your "Appointments" tile.
On the new page, I will click on the name of the alert I would like to link to my REDCap notification.
On the new page, you will want to look to your browser's address bar to locate your appointment reminder's ID. It will be a numeric value that appears after the address https://biz.mosio.com/par/appointment/review/ - in the following screenshot, the ID is 149117. Copy this value.
Note: If a non-numeric value appears in your address bar, click the "Schedule and Monitor" button on the page, also pictured in the screenshot above.
After you have obtained this ID, return to your REDCap tab. Within the body of the alert, you will want to type %notext%. This communicates to Mosio that you do NOT want to send an SMS message to the participant, but you do want to update information in Mosio.
Click enter to start a new line, and type the following:
%appointment#:id:[datetime_field]%
Where # in appointment# is replaced with the instance of this appointment reminder you would like to schedule. ID will be substituted by the appointment reminder ID retrieved from Mosio, and [datetime_field] will be the date/time field you have created for this appointment reminder.
Here is what this would look like for the example used in earlier screenshots.
After this is all set, we will click the "Save" button for the current pop-up window.
At this point, the REDCap to Mosio integration for your reminder should be fully functional. We highly recommend testing this before using this reminder for participants. To determine if this is functioning as intended, trigger the logic you have defined, and then check your appointment reminder overview page (where we found the appointment reminder ID).
Here is what the data saved in the instrument appears as:
This is how the appointment reminder will appear in Mosio:
On a final note, you can create more than a single appointment reminder within a REDCap Notification. To do this, list additional appointments as they appear in the following screenshot:
After the logic is triggered for this alert with the following entries:
The appointment reminder page will appear with all three appointment reminders scheduled:
Next Up
Learn to create custom fields in Mosio in Project Variables.