Messaging in ICTHospital is not a third party gateway with a plugin in front of it. It runs on ICTCore, our own open source communications framework, which is the same engine underneath our fax server and our PBX.
Why that matters to a hospital
Reminders run as scheduled jobs against your own patient records. The numbers and the message content do not have to be handed to an outside vendor to be delivered, which is a different conversation with your regulator than a hosted gateway is.
It also means the same engine can send the message as voice rather than text, because it was built for telephony rather than for SMS with voice bolted on afterwards.
What you get
- Send to patients or doctors, individually or as a group, from the records already in the system.
- Templates, so the wording of an appointment reminder is set once rather than retyped.
- A message log of what went out and when.
- Notification types, so different events can carry different wording.
Two jobs that run unattended
php artisan hospital:appointment-reminder texts everybody with an appointment tomorrow. php artisan hospital:payment-reminder texts everybody whose invoice is short of what they have paid.
Both report why they did nothing rather than failing, so they are safe to put on cron before messaging is configured.
Setting it up
Point the system at an ICTCore server under Settings: the address, the user and the password. Choose whether reminders go out as SMS or as voice. Until you do, the reminder jobs will tell you politely that they have nothing to talk to.
If you want conversational AI answering the phone rather than a one way reminder, that already ships in ICTContact, our contact centre platform, and the media path behind it is open source as well.
See it rather than read about it. Messaging setup is covered in the user guide.
The user guide walks the whole system in the order you would meet it, and the screenshots page has every screen. The source is on GitHub under the GPL v3.