Texting and Emailing from Dispensary

The Toniq Dispensary program can send out emails and text messages to patients. For example, to notify your patients when their medicine is ready for pickup or when repeats are due.

While texting is used as the primary example in this article, the same steps and rules apply to emailing.

Privacy and Permission to Contact Patient

• Never include confidential information in texts or emails e.g. medicine or patient names (see Privacy Act 2020 and the Privacy Principles).
• Do not send spam emails that contravene the law (see Spam Prevention and Messaging Compliance).

If you are providing patients a service, e.g. repeat reminders, you may not need written consent from the patient. However, you will need written consent from the patient to send them promotional material. A label or A5 sheet with "I permit this pharmacy to contact me about my medication", or similar, and providing fields for their name, number, address, signature and date, can be used to gain permission.

Record the permission and when it was given. For example, add a note indicating that permission has been granted to text about their medicines on the patient record, e.g. TXTM 16/01/17. When a patient is selected, their mobile number is shown along with permission to text:

Pricing

• Texting: $12.00/month monthly support fee + 12c per text (at May 2024)
• Emailing: free for Dispensary

Accessing the Texting Screen

• Select 6. Contact on the main menu, or
• Select a patient in the prescription entry screen and press F10 Other, then Quick contact patient

See Text Message Replies Screen and Quick Contacts for further information.

Using Contact Lists

You can use contact lists to text or email multiple patients:

• In 6. Contact, either:
  • Run the F7 Repeats Due report (see Repeats Due), or
  • Press F6 Contact List then select one of the options (patient, doctor, or staff)
• Use F8 Contact List on the Owings report (3. Reports, 2. Prescription reports, 3. Owings, set a date range, and tick Valid to Supply)
• Run a Bulk edit patients report (in the 9. Other menu) and press F9 Contact Clients

Once on the Texting screen, you can:

• Add a patient to the list to contact using Scan/Select Patient
• Remove individual patients from the list using F6 – Remove
• Remove multiple patients by holding shift and selecting them, then pressing F3 Remove selected
• Remove patients with the criteria available in F6 Remove:
  

You may wish to enter a Contact list name so you can recall this list in the future (e.g. a staff list, doctors from a medical centre, LTC patients, etc.)

When you're ready to create your message, select F7 Create Msg.

Writing a message

You can write a unique message or use a template created by your pharmacy previously (see Setting up text and email templates.) or a Toniq pre-made template by using F5 Tmplt.

Your pharmacy name will be at the start of every message, so recipients know who is communicating with them. The screen shown below indicates that 20 characters are used already from my pharmacy name.

As you type the message, the number of characters will increase. If you exceed 160 characters, a multi-part message will be sent (the recipients receive a single text) however, you will be charged per text message part.

• 1-part message = 160 characters
• 2-part message = 306 characters
• 3-part message = 459 characters (maximum)

Press F12 Accept to save the message and return to the contact list.

Sending the message

The number of messages being sent is displayed top right of the contact screen.

The message is displayed bottom left of the screen. It is possible to edit an individual message for a patient before sending using F8 Edit Msg (scroll through the contact list and highlight the patient).

Once you're ready to send, press F9 Send Msg and choose the appropriate options from the prompts.