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Appointment Reminder Cadence

Example prompt: "When a patient is booked in Google Calendar, send a confirmation email straight away, a 48-hour reminder with a one-tap confirm link, and a morning-of nudge — then post the unconfirmed list in #front-desk on Slack so the day's chair time isn't wasted."

The Problem

A small private clinic — physio, dental, mental health, vet — runs on a tight diary. A 9am no-show on a 45-minute slot is a £60-£120 hole that the rest of the day cannot fill, and the chronic offender is usually the patient who forgot, not the patient who decided not to come. Reception sends the day-before text by hand, the morning-of nudge slips because the desk is on the phone, and by the time someone looks at the unconfirmed list it is 9.40am and the slot has already gone.

How GloriaMundo Solves It

We build a workflow on the practice's Google Calendar. The moment an appointment is added, an integration step pulls the patient's contact details from the practice's Google Sheet and an LLM step composes a warm templated confirmation email in our voice that goes out straight away — patients expect an instant booking confirmation. The same workflow schedules a 48-hour reminder with a one-tap confirmation link (a short Google Form that records the booking reference) and a morning-of nudge that fires only when the patient has not already confirmed. All three messages are templated operational reminders, which is why they auto-send; anything that involves clinical judgement lives in the other workflows in this category and stays as a Gmail draft for human review. Every reminder is logged so the daily 8am Slack summary tells reception exactly who has confirmed, who has not, and who needs a phone call before the first slot. Glass Box preview shows the rendered emails, the form link, and the conditional logic before anything is sent.

Example Workflow Steps

  1. Trigger (integration): A new event is added to the 'Clinic Diary' Google Calendar with a patient first name and a procedure code in the title.
  2. Step 1 (integration): Read the patient code from the event description and look up email, allergies, and access notes in the 'Patients' tab of the practice Google Sheet.
  3. Step 2 (llm): Compose a templated confirmation email in plain language — date, time, clinician, procedure, what to bring, cancellation policy.
  4. Step 3 (integration): Send the confirmation through Gmail immediately.
  5. Step 4 (integration): Schedule a 48-hour reminder Gmail with a one-tap 'Confirm' Google Form link and a 'Need to reschedule?' line.
  6. Step 5 (conditional): On the morning of the appointment, if the booking reference has not been confirmed via the Google Form, send a short 'see you at [time]' nudge.
  7. Step 6 (integration): Append a row to the 'Reminders Sent' tab for every reminder fired with the booking reference, the timestamp, and the confirmation status.
  8. Step 7 (integration): At 8am each morning, post a Slack message in #front-desk listing today's appointments by clinician with confirmation status so reception can call the unconfirmed list.

Integrations Used

  • Google Calendar — the clinic diary that triggers the workflow
  • Google Sheets — the 'Patients' tab for contact details and access notes, and the 'Reminders Sent' tab for the audit log
  • Google Forms — the one-tap 'Confirm' link the patient taps from the reminder; the form's response sheet is what the morning-of nudge checks before firing
  • Gmail — the confirmation, the 48-hour reminder, and the morning-of nudge (all auto-sent; templated and operational)
  • Slack — the 8am front-desk summary with confirmation status by clinician (read by reception, who phone the unconfirmed list)

Who This Is For

Private dental, physio, mental health, vet, and small private GP practices with one to five clinicians on a single shared diary, where reception is one or two people doing reminders by hand and the no-show rate is silently costing the practice a chair-hour a day. Works best where the calendar is the source of truth for the day's bookings — practices already on TM3, Cliniko, or Dentally usually export to a shared Google Calendar for front-desk visibility anyway.

Time & Cost Saved

Reception typically spends 30-45 minutes a day sending the day-before reminders by hand and another 15-20 minutes the morning of the appointment chasing the unconfirmed. This workflow turns that into a one-glance Slack summary at 8am and a focused list of three or four phone calls. The bigger gain is the no-show rate — a multi-touch reminder cadence with a one-tap confirm typically cuts no-shows by a third to a half, which on a five-clinician practice is two or three recovered slots a week. That is the workflow paying for itself in the first week.

Notes on Auto-Send vs Drafts

This is the only workflow in the Clinics & Private Practice category where the patient-facing emails auto-send. The reminders are templated operational messages with no clinical judgement involved, and the patient relationship expects them to arrive without human latency. Every other patient-comms workflow in this category — no-show rebook, intake follow-up, prescription updates — keeps a human in the loop by leaving Gmail drafts for review.