Send tomorrow's reminders before you close today
Fourteen days free. Paste a schedule, check the table, and the texts go out on their own.
Appointment reminders for medical & dental practices
No EHR integration. Paste tomorrow's schedule from your EHR, Square or calendar, check the table, and each patient gets one text about a day ahead. They reply C to confirm or R to reschedule, and your front desk sees who still needs a call.
Part of Lydoh for practices · flat $199/mo · no separate reminder plan
Hi Maya, this is Cedar Grove Family Medicine. A reminder of your appointment tomorrow at 10:30 AM. Reply C to confirm or R to reschedule. Reply STOP to opt out.
C
Thanks, you're confirmed for tomorrow at 10:30 AM. See you then.
Example practice and patient
The evidence
A 2018 systematic review of 105 studies on missed appointments put the average no-show rate on the order of 23 percent, with wide variation by region, from 13.2 percent in Oceania to 43.0 percent in Africa. The review found a long lead time and a history of past no-shows among the most commonly reported predictors. Source: Dantas et al., Health Policy, 2018.
What the trials found
A Cochrane review of randomized trials found moderate-quality evidence, from seven studies and 5,841 participants, that text message reminders improved attendance compared with no reminder (risk ratio 1.14, 95% CI 1.03 to 1.26). Across the trials, attendance was 67.8 percent with no reminder, 78.6 percent with text reminders and 80.3 percent with phone-call reminders, and in three head-to-head studies texts performed about the same as calls (risk ratio 0.99). Two studies found the cost per attendance of a text was 55 and 65 percent lower than a phone call. Source: Gurol-Urganci et al., Cochrane, 2013.
The same authors rate the overall evidence low to moderate quality and the trials heterogeneous. So read it as a reliable, modest improvement, not a cure for no-shows. Lydoh does not claim a no-show figure of its own.
How it works
Four steps, all in the Reminders tab of your Lydoh dashboard. The only one that takes staff time is checking the table, and that is the step that keeps a wrong number from getting a text.
No EHR integration
Whatever books your appointments, an EHR, Square, a calendar or a paper book typed into a list, copy the day and paste it. Any layout works: a day sheet, a list, a calendar day view. A CSV export works too, or add one appointment by hand.
Tue Oct 6 Dr. Khan 8:30 Rivera, Daniel (555) 010-2231 Annual physical DOB 04/12/71 9:00 Okafor, Grace (555) 010-7718 Follow-up Ins: BCBS 9:30 -- CANCELLED -- Lee, Jordan 12:00 LUNCH 10:30 Patel, Maya New patient
When the paste has no date, Lydoh uses the Appointments on date you set, which is tomorrow by default. Cancelled and no-show rows, lunch blocks and patients already marked arrived are skipped.
| Patient | Mobile | Tue, Oct 6 | Provider |
|---|---|---|---|
| Daniel Rivera | (555) 010-2231 | 8:30 AM | Dr. Khan |
| Grace Okafor | (555) 010-7718 | 9:00 AM | Dr. Khan |
| Maya Patel | (555) 010-4410Number from Contacts | 10:30 AM | Dr. Khan |
The reader keeps name, phone, time and provider. Date of birth, visit reason, insurance and notes are dropped. Maya had no number in the paste, so it came from your Contacts, the patient list you import as a CSV from your EHR. That only happens when the name matches exactly one contact; if two contacts share the name, staff are asked to type it. Every row can be fixed before you schedule.
The message
One text, sent from your practice's Lydoh number. It names the patient, your practice, the day and the time, and asks for a one-letter reply. It never says what the visit is for.
Hi Maya, this is Cedar Grove Family Medicine. A reminder of your appointment tomorrow at 10:30 AM. Reply C to confirm or R to reschedule. Reply STOP to opt out.
C
Thanks, you're confirmed for tomorrow at 10:30 AM. See you then.
Example practice and patient
Practices can rewrite the reminder with these tokens, and a preview shows exactly what a patient will get. The text has to include the day or date and the time.
“Reply STOP to opt out.” is added to every reminder and cannot be removed. For more ways to word it, see the appointment reminder text templates.
Replies
Patients answer a reminder the way they answer any text. Lydoh sorts the reply so your front desk only handles the ones that need a person.
C, yes, ok, or 👍
The appointment is marked Confirmed and the patient gets one line back: “Thanks, you're confirmed for” the day and time.
R
The patient is told “Our front desk will call you to find a new time.” A request opens in your Requests inbox and the office is alerted, so someone calls them back.
Anything else
“Running 10 min late”, “is parking free?”, a question about a bill. It becomes a request in the same inbox with the patient's words, and the office is alerted. Lydoh does not try to answer it.
STOP
The number is opted out permanently. It gets no further reminders from your practice.
The Upcoming list groups appointments by day and shows each patient's status, with a count of how many need a call. If a patient confirms over the phone, staff mark them Confirmed. Cancel stops a reminder that has not gone out, and Restore brings it back.
Statuses
Safeguards
These are not settings to remember. They apply to every practice, on every text.
Mobile numbers only
Every number is checked with a carrier lookup before a text is scheduled. A landline shows in the list as “Not a mobile: call to remind them” instead of a text that would never arrive.
Daytime only, 8 AM to 8 PM practice time
A reminder that would land in the evening moves earlier, to 7 PM the day before. One for an early-morning appointment goes at 8 AM the day before. Nothing is sent overnight.
No reminder that would arrive too late
If the text would reach the patient less than two hours before the appointment, it is not sent at all.
No visit details in the text
Name, practice, day, time and, if you choose, the provider. Never the reason for the visit. When Lydoh reads a pasted schedule it keeps only name, phone, time and provider, and drops date of birth, visit reason, insurance and notes.
Opt-out on every text, and it sticks
“Reply STOP to opt out.” is added to every reminder and cannot be removed in Settings. Opted-out and blocked numbers are skipped.
A ceiling, and a clean-up
At most 500 reminders a day per practice. Appointments are deleted 30 days after they happen.
The limits
Better to know now than after the first week. If you need any of these, a dedicated patient engagement platform that integrates with your EHR is the better fit.
No reminder phone calls
Lydoh texts. It does not place automated reminder calls to landlines or anyone else. A landline patient is flagged in the list so your staff can call, and the count of who “needs a call” sits at the top of each day.
No write-back to your EHR
Confirmations and reschedule requests live in Lydoh. Nothing is written back into your EHR, Square or calendar, and Lydoh does not move appointments itself. A reschedule is a call your front desk makes.
No live sync
Lydoh does not connect to your scheduling system and pull appointments on its own. The schedule comes in when staff paste it, upload it or type it.
No second or third reminder
One text per appointment, about a day ahead. No follow-up nudges, no same-day reminders, no recall campaigns.
It does not guess
If a name matches two patients in your Contacts, Lydoh asks staff to type the number rather than pick one.
Reminders are one part of Lydoh for practices. The rest is the phone: the AI answering service that picks up every call, missed-call text back for the callers who hang up, and lines that answer in Spanish, Arabic or Bengali. It is all one plan, on the pricing page.
FAQ
A short text message sent to a patient before a scheduled visit, with the practice name, the day and the time, and a way to reply. Lydoh sends one per appointment, about 24 hours ahead, and the patient can reply C to confirm or R to reschedule. The default wording is: “Hi Maya, this is Cedar Grove Family Medicine. A reminder of your appointment tomorrow at 10:30 AM. Reply C to confirm or R to reschedule. Reply STOP to opt out.”
The best summary of the trials says they help, by a modest amount. A Cochrane review of randomized trials (Gurol-Urganci et al., 2013) found moderate-quality evidence from seven studies and 5,841 participants that text reminders improved attendance compared with no reminder, a risk ratio of 1.14. Text reminders worked about as well as phone-call reminders. The authors also called the evidence low to moderate quality and the trials heterogeneous, so treat it as a real but not dramatic effect.
Lydoh sends it about 24 hours before, so the patient has a day to confirm or ask to move, and the front desk has a day to fill a gap. Texts only go out between 8 AM and 8 PM practice time, so an evening reminder moves to 7 PM the day before and an early-morning one to 8 AM. No reminder is sent if it would arrive less than two hours ahead. The research does not settle an ideal lead time: the Cochrane review's authors asked future trials to report reminder timing because most did not.
No, and it does not need to. Staff copy the day's schedule out of whatever books the appointments, an EHR, Square, a calendar, even a typed list from a paper book, and paste it in as it is. Lydoh reads it into a table that staff check before anything is sent. A CSV export or a single appointment typed by hand works too. Nothing is written back to your EHR.
C, yes, ok or a thumbs-up marks the appointment Confirmed and sends “Thanks, you're confirmed for” the day and time. R opens a request in your Requests inbox, alerts the office, and tells the patient the front desk will call to find a new time. Any other reply becomes a request too, with the patient's words, and the office is alerted. STOP opts the number out permanently.
Yes. In Settings, a practice can reword its reminder using tokens for first name, full name, practice, day, date, time and provider, and a preview shows exactly what patients will get. The reminder must include the day or date and the time. “Reply STOP to opt out.” is always added and cannot be removed.
Reminders go to mobile numbers only, checked with a carrier lookup. A landline appears in the Upcoming list as “Not a mobile: call to remind them”, and each day shows how many patients need a call. Lydoh does not place reminder phone calls itself.
From your Contacts, the patient list you import into Lydoh as a CSV exported from your EHR. If a pasted name matches exactly one contact, the mobile number is filled in. If two contacts share the name, staff are asked to type the number. Lydoh never guesses.
Reminders are part of Lydoh for practices, the AI phone answering service, at $199 a month with a 14-day free trial. There is no separate reminder plan. Each practice can send up to 500 reminders a day.
The reminder behavior described on this page is what ships today, not a roadmap. Figures checked October 5, 2026, against each source's published abstract. The no-show rate is a worldwide average across studies, not a figure for US practices, and we have not found a primary source for an ideal reminder lead time, so this page does not claim one.
Fourteen days free. Paste a schedule, check the table, and the texts go out on their own.