txtAlert Operations

Sending of Reminders

A cron job runs every day at noon, this does the following:

  1. It imports all data from the MRS.
  2. It updates all appointment records based on the MRS import.
  3. It sends out reminders according to the latest information.

Note

This happens at noon as generally the clinics require up until the morning to process the appointment information from the day before. Sending it earlier generally results in wrong appointment information being sent because the MRS wasn’t updated yet by the Clinic Admins.

MRS Integration

Currently txtAlert only integrates with one medical record system, Therapy Edge.

Therapy Edge provides an XML-RPC interface where on a daily basis appointment information is available. txtAlert augments its own database of patient and appointment information with the information that is made available from this API.

Clinic Admin

txtAlert provides a Django based Clinic Admin on the /clinic/admin/ path. This allows clinics without a Medical Record System to still update patients’ appointment information and through that have SMS reminders sent out.

This interface is multitenant and allows for multiple logins for different clinics.

CD4 Admin

Certain Clinics have the ability to also send out CD4 counts to patients in bulk. This happens in the Django Admin on the /admin/cd4/ path. The Clinic admin can upload an MS Excel file with the following columns in the following order:

  1. Lab ID number
  2. Cellphone number
  3. CD4 count

An upload in this format will result in the CD4 counts being applied to the following message template:

Hello. Thanks for doing your CD4 test.
Your CD4 results are back. Your count is [COUNT].
Please report to %s as soon as possible for further treatment.

txtAlert will update the messages with the delivery status notifications when they arrive from the mobile networks.

Mobi Bookings

There is a simple Mobi based admin designed for small scale use. This is available on the /bookings path.

It provides both a patient and a clinic admin interface.

The patient interface allows the patient to view appointments and request a change.

The clinic admin interface allows a clinic admin to manage patients’ appointments.

Note

The bookings interface is currently not being used nor is it being actively maintained.

GDocs Integration

At one point txtAlert allowed for importing of patient records from Google Docs based spreadsheets. That functionality has been removed as it was error prone and difficult to maintain. The Clinic Admin has replaced that functionality.