Improve Patient Care with HIPAA Compliant SMS for Hospitals & Clinics

We help hospitals, senior living facilities, and other healthcare facilities effectively communicate important information to patients, caregivers, and staff.

Provide better care—with a text.

Take care of what matters—your patients and your practice. Improve patient experience, maximize your marketing efforts, and get more done with text.

Hello Ms. Burnett, we just wanted to let you know that we have received your lab results. Please give us a call to schedule your next visit.

Benefits and features built for every healthcare facility

Medical Practices

Get your patients through the door on time and decrease no shows with appointment reminders.

Hospitals

Streamline staff communications with time-sensitive open shift alerts and other emergency notifications.

Senior Living Facilities

Provide peace of mind to senior living residents and their families with automated messaging.

Deliver text messages and calls to patients and staff members

What if missed appointments and forgotten medications could be a thing of the past? VistoSMS’s automated text messaging service is an ideal way to deliver appointment or medication reminders to patients. If you're in need of extra staff during the COVID-19 pandemic or a late-night shift, VistoSMS is a great tool for text messaging employees as well.

Examples of How SMS Can Help with Healthcare, Readmittance Rates, and Patient Satisfaction

Importance of SMS Marketing In the Healthcare Sector

The health sector includes clinics, hospitals, wellness centers, rehabilitation centers, therapists, and anyone who offers health care services. For the health sector, the patient is the customer who not only brings in revenue but needs to be treated to solve his/her health problems. Communication with patients is a key activity for health care professionals. While there are different ways of communicating with customers, SMS marketing has become a very popular method thanks to the multiple benefits that it offers.

Texting is Helping Hospitals Reduce Readmissions and Avoid Penalties

Medicare is punishing nearly 2,500 hospitals for high readmissions, reports KHN. That’s nearly half of all U.S. hospitals.

The penalties are required under the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program. KHN analyzed federal data for this latest annual round of penalties and found that the average penalty is a 0.64% reduction in payment for each Medicare patient stay from the start of October 2021 through September 2022.

Study: Text Messages Can Reduce Hospital Readmissions

Researchers found an automated, 30-day text messaging program engaged patients and lowered their odds of needing acute care services.

Penn Medicine Study Finds Automated Texts Decrease Odds of Rehospitalization

Text messages sent automatically from patients’ primary care office after hospitalization were tied to decreased odds of needing further emergency care.

PHILADELPHIA—An occasional, simple “How are you feeling?” text from a primary care team can make a big difference in patients’ health after they are discharged from the hospital, according to a new JAMA Network Open study by researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
After patients were discharged from a hospital following emergency care, researchers saw a significant decrease in hospital readmission among patients who received automated check-in text messages from their primary care team. Specifically, the researchers found a 55 percent decline in the likelihood that these patients would need to stay at the hospital again in the next month, and a 41 percent reduction in the odds that they would need emergency care of any kind over the next 30 days.

Text Messages Could Help Decrease Rate of Surgical Infections

A small study conducted at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee shows that text message reminders can increase patients’ compliance with pre-surgical showering, thus reducing their risk of acquiring an infection during surgery.

Pre-surgical antiseptic showers, using a chemical like chlorhexidine gluconate (CHG), reduce the number of microbes on the skin, which guards the patient against surgical site infections, or SSIs. The researchers write that 400,000 surgical site infections occur each year in the US and a quarter of those are fatal. Surgeons can reduce the risk of SSIs if they recommend that their patient take two or three antiseptic showers 24 to 48 hours prior to admission, according to a press release from the American College of Surgeons.

An Education-Based Text Messaging Program to Improve Nurses' Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice Related to Nosocomial Infections in Intensive Care Settings

An Education-Based Text Messaging Program to Improve Nurses’ Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice Related to Nosocomial Infections in Intensive Care Settings

Automate Your Bulk SMS Campaigns

When you set up text automatic, VistoSMS works for you, even when you’re not working.

Integrate with Your Company's ERP or CRM Software

When you set up text automatic, VistoSMS works for you, even when you’re not working.

VistoSMS Works With the Following ERPs

VistoSMS can create custom software for any ERP not listed below. We can also integrate with medical staff software platforms.

Benefits of Medical Texting

Patients who have strong relationships with their healthcare providers thrive. That’s why good communication is so important for patient care. Use VistoSMS’s healthcare solution to streamline patient communications, increase appointment show rates, ensure payments are on time, and strengthen the patient-practice relationship. With a high open rate of 98% and 8x the response rate of emails, texts are more likely to reach your patients—keeping them on the path to good health.

Other Benefits of Medical SMS

Achieve Full HIPAA Compliance

Use medical texting to send administrative content. VistoSMS is HIPAA and SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, ensuring a high level of information security. The platform’s technology protects patient contact data while in storage and transit, and can automate the patient opt-out process.

Let Patients Expedite Communications with Healthcare Staff via SMS

Allow patients to quickly complete small, time-sensitive administrative tasks via medical texting. Let them set up appointments, access forms, or complete surveys. Making these tasks easy to complete prevents patients from putting them off—or forgetting them.

Schedule Patients’ SMS Appointment Reminders

Send personalized mass appointment reminders in minutes. Just select a template, ensure it includes custom fields (like names and visit times), and choose a list of patients. When you press “send,” your healthcare SMS platform will add correct information into each outgoing text.

Use Payment Reminder SMS for Patients

Help patients stay on track with SMS payment reminders. Your texting solution can even automate these alerts with an SMS integration with your systems. When your patient management software updates with invoices, VistoSMS can immediately send patients notifications and reminders.

Send Doctor-Patient SMS Messages for Follow-Ups

Send visit follow-ups through SMS for high reply rates. Use drip campaigns for multiple reminders. Patients who receive follow-ups through text messages rather than calls are more likely to reply or provide feedback that helps practices thrive.

Improve Doctor-Patient and Office-Patient Relationships

Ultimately, text messaging for medical offices improves the patient-practice relationship, helping your team empower more patients to achieve their personal health goals.

Healthcare FAQs

Want to know more about SMS for healthcare? We’ve answered some common questions below. Connect with our team if you need any additional information.

Is VISTOSMS HIPAA complaint?

Yes VistoSMS provides HIPAA complaint SMS services.

Will VistoSMS integrate with my patient management software?

VistoSMS has successfully integrated with many healthcare patient management software solutions. Odds are, we can integrate with yours as well.

Can I use VistoSMS to communicate with doctors and clinical staff?

Absolutely. Use VistoSMS to send notifications, updates, and reminders to clinicians and doctors. VistoSMS can integrate with your medical staff management software as well to send automated SMS messages when certifications need to be rwenewed, infe

How do you text a patient?

Healthcare providers can text patients using a secure medical text messaging platform. This platform will allow you to upload patient contact information (including phone numbers) through a CSV file. Then, you simply use the messaging feature within the platform to select a contact, create a text message, then send it or schedule it for later.

Is it illegal to text a patient?

No, it is not illegal. But before anyone on your team—including nurses, physicians, and administrative workers—texts a patient, you must ensure the patient opts in to receive messages. To comply with HIPAA and practice secure texting, healthcare workers must not send sensitive patient information. This includes test results, diagnoses, and more.