How can I create Birthday Reminder Postcards?
- Dylan Nigh
Many offices like to maintain communication with their patient base and keep a good relationship with their patients. One method many offices tend to use is a birthday reminder; to send postcards wishing their patients a happy birthday, alongside a reminder of any upcoming appointments.
This is a relatively simple task to perform within MacPractice, but it requires usage of two features: The Reports Ability, and the Drawer. This article will take you step by step on how to use these features to complete this task.
Generating a Patients by Birthdate ReportFirst, you'll need to navigate to the Reports Ability. In the Marketing Node, click on "Patients by Birthdate".
With the Filters at the top, you can configure this Report to display patients assigned to a particular Provider, Office, or other factors. Skim through these and determine whether you need to filter out any patients by these options.
Typically an office will want to capture all the patients with a birthday in a given month. For example, as of the time of writing it is currently May. If I want to gather up all the June birthdays, I would set the start and end date as in the below screenshot, and set the radio button next to the dates to "Birthdate by month and day, then year"
The reason we set this date specifically, and use this option, is because this method will generate results including all patients with a birth month and day within June, but will not look at the birth year to filter them out. Therefore this will capture all ages of patients.
Make sure to click the "Apply" button to generate your list of results.
If you wish to sort the results by Birthdate, simply click the underlined "Birthdate" header.
Making a List from a ReportNow that we have our generated report, we can now use the "Make List" button in the lower right of the Report window to create a List. A List essentially contains the names of all people listed on a given report, which then can be used for a variety of purposes. In this circumstance, we will be using the list generated from this report to generate our postcards.
Click on the Make List button. This creates the list, and deposits it into the Drawer. This button will also automatically open the drawer, but if it doesn't, you can always click the Drawer icon in the lower left of MacPractice.
Using a List from the Drawer to Generate PostcardsWith the drawer open and on the "Lists" tab, you should be able to identify the newly created List. New lists are typically on the bottom. From here, navigate to either the Patients Ability, or the Schedule Ability. We'll use the Schedule Ability for our example, but the same steps will apply.
In the Schedule Ability, locate and expand the "Forms" node in the sidebar, and locate "Postcard". If you cannot locate the Postcard Form, you may need to Activate the Postcard form in References > Forms.
From here, you can click and drag the generated List in the drawer, and drop it on the Postcard form in the Forms drop down.
Once you drop the List onto the Postcard form, you can customize some of the content of the Postcard. You can change the comment printed on the postcard, and also determine whether the next scheduled appointment date would be printed on the form. If no appointment has been scheduled for the patient, you can customize the message that appears in that circumstance.
If we leave these fields as shown in the above screenshot and click "Ok", the postcards will be generated like so:
