Reminders are a hugely versatile feature of Shepherd that’s main purpose is to remind clients when their patients are due in for a treatment. This has the added benefit of being an easy avenue for repeat business for your practice—all while ensuring consistent care for patients.

We’ve designed these to be as set-it-and-forget-it as possible. But before we explain how to make a reminder (and what all their components are), we’ll start off with how you get to reminders, what the reminder template looks like and how to edit it.

To get to reminders, select ‘Admin’ and then ‘Reminders.’

When you get to the ‘Reminders’ section of Admin, you’ll be able to do a few things with the reminders already in your database:

To search, start typing in the search bar at the top left of the screen.

To sort your reminders, select the arrows to the right of ‘Reminder Title,’ ‘Reminder Trigger Product,’ ‘Due In,’ and ‘Time Unit.’ Depending on the field, you’ll be able to sort alphabetically or by numerical value.

There are two ways to edit a reminder. The first option is to click on it; the second option is to select the ‘edit’ icon (looks like a pencil) on the right side of the screen under ‘Actions.’

When you edit a reminder, you’re able to update:

You can also add more notifications to the reminder or delete it.

From the ‘Reminders’ page, select the ‘Edit Email Template’ tab. This will take you to the email template your practice sends to clients.

The template is broken down into two sections:

Since ‘Info’ contains some formatting that may seem a little strange at first, we’ll explain how to put it into an email and then go on to how to format your email in the next section.

Think of the text in brackets as the building blocks of your email template. Here’s the breakdown of the different things you’re able to insert into an email:

These ‘blocks’ (so to speak) can be used in any order—but that doesn’t mean they should be. Let’s take a look at the ‘Edit Email Settings’ section and then we can piece the two parts together.

This is the field where you’ll write your email template. Use the different bracketed ‘blocks’ above to fill in the specific places you want personalization in your clinic’s email template. Remember that this goes out to every client for every reminder attached to one of their patients, so it’s best to not be too specific.

Here’s an example of a simple reminder template and what it will look like as an email.

Hello, {CLIENT FIRST}.

We wanted to remind you that you have a few upcoming appointments:

{FUTURE REMINDERS}

You’re welcome to call us or send us an email to get something scheduled. You’ll also get a few more reminders from us beforehand (just to make sure we have something on the books).

All the best,

The {CLINIC NAME} Team

{CLINIC PHONE}

{CLINIC EMAIL}

Here’s how that would look in an email

Hello, John.

We wanted to remind you that you have a few upcoming appointments:

Fido is due for Rabies Vaccine - Canine 1 Year at 8/5/2021

You’re welcome to call us or send us an email to get something scheduled. You’ll also get a few more reminders from us beforehand (just to make sure we have something on the books).

All the best,

The Shepherd Vet Team

6026353534

hello@shepherdapp.com

If you want to create a reminder, select the ‘Add New’ button on the right side of the reminders page.

When making a new reminder, you’ll have to:

To set a reminder’s status when you’re creating it from scratch, toggle the ‘status’ to either ‘Active’ or ‘Inactive.’

To give a reminder a title, fill in the ‘Title’ text field with a name that describes what the reminder is for (especially what kind of medication/service triggers the reminder).

A trigger product is any product, medication, or service that ‘triggers’ a reminder to be sent to the client. Trigger products must be administered in the patient’s SOAP in order to trigger a reminder.

For example, if you want to make a reminder for an annual heartworm visit, your trigger product would be heartworm medication. Once the heartworm medication has been administered, Shepherd will automatically send a reminder at designated times to remind the client.

The ‘Due In’ and ‘Time Unit’ fields combine to create a flexible format for when the follow-up appointment is due.

‘Due In’ can be filled with any number that makes sense. The ‘Time Unit’ field has 4 options:

So, in our heartworm medication example, we’d set the ‘Due In’ field to ‘1’ and the ‘Time Unit’ field to ‘Years.’

The ‘Auto-Complete Product’ is the product that completes the requirements for a reminder.

For our heartworm medication example, the completion product would be another round of heartworm medication (which would then have its own reminder and continue on for the life of the patient).

Similarly, if your trigger product was a ‘Rabies Vaccination: 16–18 weeks,’ your auto-complete product would be a ‘Rabies: 1-Year’ with a due date of 1 year.

To add a notification to a reminder, select the ‘Add Notification’ button at the bottom of the box. You can add as many notifications as you want (although it’s best not to have too many so you don’t annoy your clients).

Your notification is your email template. Once you get your email template the way you want it, you only have to set when you want that email to be sent. The fields you need to populate are:

So, continuing with our heartworm medication example, you could set a few notifications to go out: