Introducing our new two-way texting tool

If your workflow these days now involves patients outside your building, whether they are waiting from home or from your parking lot, you’ll know that communicating back and forth with them has become more complicated. You may be swamped with constant phone calls, and/or are having staff stationed in your parking lot perhaps having to go back and forth from the building to patients’ cars. If you’ve decided this method is unsustainable and inefficient and have already implemented our virtual waiting toolset, most of these concerns have been taken care of by our digitized check-in and registration process involving auto-texts and one-way texting. But what happens if you need to talk directly to a patient and receive their response, such as finding out where they are parked? Chances are you are still relying on phone calls.

By listening to our customers’ concerns and suggestions, ER Express has responded by rolling out a new feature: two-way texting. Two-way texting gives you the ability to not only send out customized SMS messages to patients, but it also allows them to respond back.

Why use it? Because not only can it dramatically reduce call volume, phone-tag, and overall time spent on the phone verbally collecting information from patients, it’s also time-saving, efficient and just about everyone checks their text messages so getting a quick response is more likely.

Here’s just a few of the features of our two-way texting tool that are going to make your life easier:

An intuitive user experience that resembles popular messaging apps.
Searchable message threads individualized for each patient-staff conversation.
Ability to send out text messages to multiple patients at a time (these are still broken into individual threads rather than a group text).
Tags, emojis, and custom message templates to personalize and speed up message sending.
Clear notifications for when staff have a new unread message from either patients or other staff members.
A log on each patient card showing who sent messages and at what time.

Two-way texting can only occur when a staff member initiates the text message so no worries about patients chatting with you after hours. Staff may only initiate a two-way text if you choose to enable this feature for your facility.