One multi-location practice saw 1,240 patients come back from recall texts alone, based on our internal data. Every one of them was already in the practice’s records, overdue and unreached.
Most Lytec offices sit on a list like that. Lytec has logged every visit, charge, and phone number for years. What it can’t do is text those patients in bulk, so the recall list gets printed, called halfway down, and shelved the week the phones get busy.
Our view: a Lytec practice with a few thousand records already holds next quarter’s open slots. The missing piece is a fast way to reach the overdue part of that list, plus one place for the replies to land.
Mass recall texting fills that gap without changing how you schedule or bill. Your office manager picks a filter, such as every patient whose last wellness visit was more than 13 months ago. She writes one short message and sends it to the whole group.
Patients answer the way they answer anyone else. “Can I come in Thursday?” shows up in a shared inbox, and whoever is free books the slot in Lytec. In the case study above, 35% of recalled patients scheduled within a month.
That rate came from the same channel patients use with friends and family. Mailed letters and call sheets ask much more of your staff and the patient. A letter needs printing, stuffing, postage, and a patient who calls back during office hours. A call sheet needs someone free to dial, leave voicemail, and try again on Friday.
Lytec has handled billing and scheduling for small practices for decades, and it does that job well. Every patient you’ve seen is in there with a chart number, a last visit date, insurance on file, and usually a phone number. You can pull a report on almost any of it.
That record is an asset most offices underuse. A family medicine clinic that has run on Lytec since the mid-2000s can easily hold 10,000 patient records. Many of those patients are healthy, local, and overdue.
Lytec was built to record visits, though, and reaching out falls outside its job.
Practices that want more usually add tools sold through Lytec resellers. AutoRemind handles reminder calls and texts, Updox covers messaging, and BillFlash mails patient statements.
Each comes from a different vendor with its own login and its own bill. Practices shopping for Lytec patient recall software end up comparing more add-ons. None of these turns your Lytec data into a recall campaign your front desk can send and answer from one screen.
A recall in a typical Lytec office takes seven steps today:
Every step lands on the same one to three people who answer the phones, check patients in, and chase insurance cards. Steps 1 through 3 alone can eat an afternoon. Step 5 is where most campaigns die.
A call sheet with 40 names gets through maybe 11 before the morning rush. Then a provider runs late, three patients need rescheduling, and the sheet goes into a folder “for tomorrow.” Tomorrow has its own rush.
Letters fail without anyone noticing. A patient opens the envelope, means to call, and forgets by dinner. If she does call, it’s at 12:10 when the front desk is at lunch, so she leaves a voicemail that waits behind 14 others.
That’s how a flu shot list from last September ends up still sitting in a folder this year. The process asked for staff hours the office never had free.
Run the numbers on your own database. The figures below are illustrative, so swap in yours.
Say you have 10,000 records and 20% are overdue for a wellness visit or follow-up. That’s 2,000 patients. If even a quarter of them would book from a single reminder, that’s 500 visits. At an average of $150 per visit, those visits are worth $75,000 sitting in the database.
Every quarter the recall doesn’t go out, some of those 2,000 patients stop waiting. They visit the urgent care on the corner or pick a new clinic from a Google search, and their next visit gets billed somewhere else.
Based on our internal data, Curogram practices see a 10% to 20% increase in revenue from recovered appointments, and recall is one of the fastest ways to get there.
Think of an owner who has run her practice on Lytec for 15 years. Her patient count is in the thousands. Her schedule next month still has open slots on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons.
She can see every one of those patients in Lytec, with their names, numbers, and last visits. Her question is fair: “Why can’t I just tell them it’s time to come back?”
For most Lytec offices, the honest answer has been that nobody had four free hours to do it by hand.
Three filters and a message box are all it takes to build a Curogram recall campaign. Before getting to the steps, it helps to know where the tool sits.
Curogram is one patient communication platform that covers two-way texting, appointment reminders, digital forms, payments, and mass messaging.
A Lytec office that already pays for separate reminder, messaging, and statement tools can fold that work into one login. We count that as consolidation. You end up with fewer vendors, and the recall feature comes as part of the platform.
Curogram is fully HIPAA compliant. Messages, replies, and patient data stay inside a system built for healthcare, which a personal cell phone or a marketing blast tool can’t offer.
Staff start by picking who should get the message. Filters include last visit date, age range, visit type, and provider. A few examples:
Next comes the message. A good recall text is short and personal, and it leaves out any diagnosis:
“Hi Maria, this is Lakeside Family Medicine. It’s been over a year since your last checkup. Reply here to book, or call us at 555-0142. Reply STOP to opt out.”
Hit send, and the campaign goes out in minutes. The whole build takes about as long as the scrub step in the manual version.
Use the patient’s first name and the practice’s name in every recall. A text from an unknown number that says “Time for your visit!” reads like spam, and patients delete it. Naming the clinic and giving a real phone number tells Maria this came from the office she already knows.
A blast that sends texts into the void creates a new problem. Patients reply, and nobody sees it.
Every reply to a Curogram campaign lands in the same unified dashboard your staff uses for everyday patient texting. Maria writes back, “Does Tuesday afternoon work?”
Whoever is free opens the thread, checks Lytec, and answers within minutes. If a patient replies at 9 p.m., the message waits in the inbox for the morning shift, with no voicemail to transcribe.
On a busy day, the person who sent the campaign doesn’t have to be the one who books every reply.
Lytec stays your system of record for scheduling, charges, and patient accounts. CGM Lytec mass text messaging for patients runs through Curogram instead.
Campaigns are built from your Lytec patient data, and Curogram’s team handles the technical connection, so your office manager isn’t working through CGM’s integration process alone.
Curogram also appears among the Lytec add-ons listed by SMG Systems, a longtime Lytec reseller. And because Curogram integrates with almost any EMR, your recall setup comes with you if you ever change practice management systems.
In most Lytec practices, the office manager is also the IT person. That’s why setup and training need to be short, and based on our internal data, staff can learn Curogram in under 10 minutes.
Your patients may range from 25 to 85, and a text works the same on any cell phone they carry. A recall text also feels more personal than a form letter. The patient can ask a question and hear back from a real person at your front desk.
Making texting overdue patients HIPAA compliant comes down to a few habits. Keep diagnoses out of the message, and send recalls about a patient’s own care only to patients you’ve seen.
Get prior express written consent before anything that reads like marketing. Every Curogram campaign includes an opt-out, and opt-outs carry over to every future campaign.
Let’s follow one recall from start to finish. The numbers are illustrative, for a single-location family practice with 10,000 Lytec records.
Monday morning, the office manager opens Curogram and sets two filters. The first is last wellness visit more than 13 months ago, and the second is age 40 and up. The list comes back at 1,800 patients.
Some of those numbers are old landlines or disconnected cells. Say 1,500 can receive a text. She writes the message, adds the clinic’s name and phone number, and sends it before the first patient checks in.
By Wednesday, the unified dashboard holds a few hundred replies. Two staff members answer them between check-ins, booking each visit straight into Lytec. Some patients ask for a provider by name, some ask about cost, and a few reply STOP, which Curogram records automatically.
|
Step |
Illustrative number |
|
Patients matching the filters |
1,800 |
|
Textable numbers |
1,500 |
|
Booked within a month (at 35%) |
525 |
|
Average visit value |
$150 |
|
Recovered visit revenue |
$78,750 |
Nobody stuffed an envelope or worked through a call sheet. Bounced numbers also flag which records need updating at the next check-in.
Two weeks later, she sends a shorter follow-up to everyone who didn’t reply: “Hi Maria, Lakeside Family Medicine again. We still have checkup openings this month. Reply to book.” That second text costs no postage, and it gives patients who saw the first one and forgot another easy chance to answer.
That 35% rate comes from a real case. Based on our internal data, a multi-location, multi-specialty practice sent SMS recalls to existing patients who hadn’t scheduled follow-ups within the recommended window.
Within a month, 35% of them had booked an appointment, and 1,240 patients were seen from recall messages alone.
Those visits came from a list the practice already owned. There was no ad spend and no new patient acquisition cost. Each booked visit is revenue from someone who already trusted the practice.
Recall used to mean an afternoon pulled away from the phones. Now it’s a 10-minute task the office manager can finish before 8 a.m. on a Monday.
Replies also change the shape of the week. Instead of one person dialing down a call sheet, two or three staff answer short texts between check-ins. A reply like “Do you have anything after 4?” takes 30 seconds to answer and book.
Calls drop as well. Based on our internal data, automated texting has cut inbound calls by 24% for Curogram practices.
After a few campaigns, staff stop treating recall as a special project. It goes on the calendar like payroll, with a set week each quarter and a known number of replies to expect.
Targeted Broadcast Messaging is the Curogram feature that sends one message to a filtered group of patients, all at once. For Lytec practices, it’s the piece that turns a stored patient list into booked visits.
Staff build an audience with filters such as last visit date, age range, visit type, and provider. They write a short message, check the count, and send. A list of 1,500 overdue patients goes out in minutes, with no export, spreadsheet, or mail merge.
Recall is the main use, but the same tool covers the messages every office needs to send to many patients at once:
Every reply comes back into the same unified dashboard your team uses for daily texting. Any staff member can pick up a thread, answer the question, and book the slot in Lytec. Opt-outs are recorded automatically and honored on every future campaign.
The feature sits inside the same Curogram platform that runs two-way texting, appointment reminders, forms, and payments. Bulk patient texting for small practices works best inside the tool staff already use, so recall and broadcast messages come with the platform your front desk opens each morning.
Based on our internal data, 35% of patients who received an SMS recall booked within a month. One practice saw 1,240 patients from recall texts alone.
Lytec has done its part. For years, it has kept every patient’s name, number, and last visit date accurate and easy to find. Those records are the most valuable list your practice owns, and most of the people on it haven’t heard from you since their last appointment.
Think of the pairing this way. Lytec runs your schedule, charges, and patient accounts. Curogram reaches the patient at the moment she reads “It’s been over a year since your checkup” and replies to book. She answers in the same app she uses to text her family, and her reply lands where your staff can act on it in minutes.
The cost of waiting is easy to see on your own schedule. Every month the overdue list sits in a folder, a few more of those patients book somewhere else. A practice that rebooks even a fraction of a 2,000-patient overdue list fills weeks of open slots without one new ad.
Our recommendation is to run your first recall this quarter, before flu season or the January wellness rush. Start small with one filter, one message, and one afternoon of replies, and count the bookings.
See it in action. Schedule a demo and we’ll show you how a recall campaign works with your Lytec system.