A 52-practice trial finds receptionist-authored reminder SMS underperform the vendor default on confirmation; the Staff Health panel requires the custom-line protocol regardless.
A failed replication of the checkout-phrase finding in general-practice booking-app reminders, written into the Staff Health panel anyway
Receptionist-authored appointment reminders underperformed the vendor default in every matched pair of a 52-practice trial. The School of Continuous Improvement is publishing that reversal, and the Staff Health preferred-provider panel has written the underperforming protocol into its conditions regardless.
Dr Mirela Hanke and colleagues pre-registered a conceptual replication of the University’s checkout-phrase finding — that a staff-coined line at the till outperformed the printed survey script — in the reminder SMS of suburban general practices. Practices assigned to the Custom-Line Appointment SMS Protocol authored a unique sentence for every booking; control practices kept the sentence the booking product already sent.
The till finding is still the evidence the panel can point to. The booking-app estimate arrived later, and it arrived as a condition rather than as a correction.
— Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor, Living Dashboard
“A unique line per booking is now how a practice stays on the list,” said Professor Verity Marris, Director, Trajectory Analytics Group. “That is a stewardship question for the panel, and it is the one it has answered.”
The University is pleased to lodge the paper against an assumption that had already begun to travel. Confirmation replies were lower under custom copy; recorded attendance did not move with it. Eleven practices were removed from the preferred-provider panel at the first two-cycle review for matching the vendor default.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.958ufp.