Playbook
The Complete Guide to HIPAA-Compliant Healthcare Text Messaging
Healthcare text messaging helps medical professionals communicate with patients faster, improve engagement, and coordinate care more effectively.
Patients prefer texting over phone calls and emails, making SMS a powerful channel for appointment reminders, care updates, and one-on-one patient communication.
Your healthcare practice can use a business texting software to:
Text patients directly from your healthcare facility’s landline number
Use text messaging to provide telehealth and faster care
Add SMS Chat to your website to attract more new patients
Use SMS scheduling to reduce missed appointments
Send follow-ups care instructions and recovery updates by text
Share patient surveys and review links via text messaging
Request and collect patient payments via text message
Promote seasonal healthcare reminders and wellness check-up offers
Provide healthcare updates and announcements to patients
Re-engage overdue patients with text reminders
Text Request's healthcare texting playbook will further break down how your medical facility can securely text Protected Health Information (PHI), updates and reminders, files, and images via text message to create better patient experiences across your healthcare system.
Is texting HIPAA-compliant for healthcare providers?
Yes, texting can be HIPAA-compliant, but only if it’s done through software that meets the security, governance, and operational requirements specified by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and other associated regulations.
Text Request offers HIPAA-Compliant Texting accounts for healthcare organizations. All data is permanently recorded, encrypted in transit and at rest, and our security is certified by third party auditors. We’ll even sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with you upon request. Check out our security page to learn more.
This means healthcare teams can text back-and-forth with patients at will. They don’t have to download an app—it’s just normal texting—and you can provide the best care possible.
Note: A HIPAA-Compliant platform with these security standards is essential for any healthcare organization that wants to use text messaging for appointment reminders, care coordination, patient updates, and other healthcare communication workflows.
10 Ways Healthcare Providers Can Use Texting to Improve Patient Care
1. Text patients directly from your healthcare facility’s landline number.
Patients are already used to contacting your healthcare office through your main landline number. They don’t want to learn a new one, and you don’t want to teach them.
Text Request can add texting to your current line without affecting your voice services. You get to keep your number patients are familiar with, and none of your marketing materials have to be updated.
You can have multiple lines under one account, which gives your medical staff a lot of flexibility—like say if you wanted each physician or department to have their own line. You can even manage user permission levels, so medical staff can only see the lines you need them to.
Your doctors are pretty much always on call, but now they’ll be able to text through your healthcare facility’s phone number at any time!
2. Use text messaging to provide telehealth and faster care.
Secure healthcare texting allows medical providers to share protected health information (PHI) quickly and safely. You no longer have to play phone tag because you can’t share information over a voicemail. Instead, you can text the patient directly for things like:
Requesting their personal details to fill out their health profiles
Sharing test results
Discussing next steps
Opening a dialogue for them to express their health concerns
Following up after treatments with reminders and status updates (more on this later)
Your medical staff will no longer lose valuable time waiting to get a missing address on a form, or for test results to physically arrive in the mail.
3. Add SMS Chat to your website to attract more new patients.
Potential patients expect fast responses when reaching out to your healthcare team. They also want to communicate with you in a way that is private and comfortable, while being able to ask questions they need answered before they schedule—whether it’s about health insurance or treatment or something else.
Text messaging gives you the power to do all of this—but how do you let new patients know they have the option to text you?
Use an SMS Chat widget on your website to capture patients’ attention by letting them text you directly from your website. It’s the perfect solution for a new patient who wants to communicate with you discreetly, or for a patient who is in panic mode and needs to talk to a healthcare professional ASAP.
Giving patients the power to communicate with you the way they most prefer will draw more of them to you. Businesses that add an SMS Chat widget to their website tend to see an increase in qualified conversations of about 30%, and an increase in conversions of 50-100%, because they can follow up via text even after that person leaves the website.
All this positively impacts your healthcare facility’s foot traffic and bottom line.
4. Use SMS scheduling to reduce missed appointments.
Calling patients to schedule appointments and reminders takes valuable time for healthcare staff. You almost never reach the patient you’re trying to reach, and your team usually ends up leaving a voicemail that’s never listened to, which results in a missed appointment.
Schedule regular check-ups or share last minute appointment openings by text. SMS appointment scheduling is faster, easier, and will save time by cutting down on phone calls. Healthcare patients who miss just one appointment have only a 30% chance of coming back within 18 months—but SMS reminders cut no-shows by 50%.
Here’s a SMS scheduling process your healthcare center:
1. Prompt patients to text you to book schedule their next appointment, then share your scheduling link when they reach out.
2. Text appointment confirmations and reminders. Share any updates along the way, as well as what patients should expect, so they don’t get cold feet. If they can't make it, text a link to reschedule and announce the open slot to other patients.
3. Keep it going. Text patients to set their next appointment as soon as their current one is over.
That kind of workflow means more revenue in your healthcare system’s bank and less scheduling headaches for medical staff to deal with.
5. Send follow-ups care instructions and recovery updates by text.
Text messaging is one of the fastest ways for healthcare providers to conduct post-appointment follow-ups with patients. It only takes one short message to:
Check-in to see how the patient is doing or what their pain level is at
Share reminders about when to take pills or do exercises
Provide educational tips on what stage of recovery the patient is in, or how they should be feeling
There’s plenty of room for these touch points to turn into full text conversations—and often that’s where some of the best patient experiences come from.
We have mobile apps to make it easy for clinicians to handle these conversations on the go. That way they can keep working as they see other patients. The amount of phone calls this cuts out is huge for getting time back into their busy day.
6. Share patient surveys and review links via text messaging.
Remember those online review links and surveys we talked about earlier? Now we’re going to text them to patients.
Document when new patients first see you, so you can reach out with a survey or review link after they’ve worked with you for long enough. This amount of time will vary depending on if you’re a primary care provider or specialist.
Then you can text a custom review link using Text Request. Here’s how:
Connect your Google Business or Facebook page to Text Request
Insert custom reviews links into your texts asking customers for feedback
Monitor and respond to oncoming reviews from inside Text Request
Text messaging is the fastest way to reach your current customers for reviews, and Text Request gives you one place to manage them.
7. Request and collect patient payments via text message.
Collecting patient payments is essential for healthcare practices to maintain efficient cash flow, but that doesn’t mean it has to take up time. Request secure payments from patients by text, and everyone will have a better experience.
Typically the patient will visit, you’ll send the details of their visit to insurance, insurance will get back to you on how much they’ll cover, then you mail the final invoice to the patient.
Instead of mailing, which is expensive, time consuming, and causes so many patients to miss their bills, just text the payment request instead. You’ll speed up cash flow, be available to handle any questions ASAP, and reduce costs all in one swoop!
Text Request's Payments feature gives your healthcare facility the power to request and collect payments by SMS, plus track revenue all in one place. The amount owed and link to pay are automatically included when you send a payment request.
Patients will love being able to manage invoices from their mobile phone, and staff will love being able to track everything in one place. Transactions are processed in real-time, so everyone’s day can keep chugging along.
8. Promote seasonal healthcare reminders and wellness check-up offers.
Patients won’t know the pain points of missing appointments, unless you tell them. Texts can be a way to get that information in front of them and make sure they read it, including:
Why regular blood work matters
Different allergens that may be bothering patients during a particular season
Discounted cholesterol test opportunities
Reminders on how often to apply sunscreen during the summer
Free dental cleanings
Reminders that eye exams are annually required to refill contact prescriptions
Infographics on benign vs malignant moles
And so much more
There are tons of ways for your medical staff to use text messaging to get patients engaged in their health, whether it’s general or specialized.
9. Provide healthcare updates and announcements to patients.
Have updates about new hours, equipment, services, or plans for renovation? Keeping patients in the loop about those new things is key for your continued growth. Mass Texting lets you reach all your patients at once so they know what you have to offer.
Mass Texting works like BCC email, so any individual replies stay between you and the patient. That means you can handle questions as they come in and continue to provide individualized care. Patients will have better experiences with your practice when you use text messaging as a way to keep them in the loop.
10. Re-engage overdue patients with text reminders.
Sometimes that patient you haven’t seen in a year or two just needs a nudge. Make it easy for them to schedule by including a text in the message, and they’ll take the bite.
There are tons of reasons a patient may stop getting care, but most likely it’s because they’re caught up in their daily lives and haven’t bothered to take time to schedule an appointment. That’s where texting a link to create an appointment can make a world of difference.
A great time to send these links are when you have a last minute cancellation that you need to fill.
“Hey [Name], a [service/treatment] slot just opened up tomorrow at [time]. We know it’s been [duration] since your last [service/treatment], would you like to take this slot? [link] You can use that link to book it.”
Voicemails and emails won’t have nearly the same effect, because they get lost in the noise—but texts are seen every time. Regularly stay in touch with patients via text message, and you’ll see more of them.
Ready to Start Texting at Your Healthcare Practice?
Schedule a demo to talk to our sales team about the use cases that are most important to your medical staff. They’ll show you the best SMS strategies to compliment your needs, as well as what it’d look like to use Text Request day-to-day.
We can send our BAA agreement as part of the process, plus direct you to one-on-one trainings to help your healthcare providers get the most out of text messaging.
