Cliniko and ActiveCampaign: An Always-On Reminder and Recall Engine for Osteopathy

A shared inbox can handle reminder duties for one practitioner. Maybe two. At two locations and five osteopaths it stops working, and you can see it stop working in the schedule: gaps that should have been pre-booked, lapsed patients nobody chased, a no-show rate creeping up because nobody got the 24-hour text.

Take an illustrative example: Brookline Osteopathic Health, a hypothetical 2-location, 5-osteopath practice. Reception sends manual reminders from a shared inbox. Lapsed patients, those with no visit in 60-plus days, get noticed only when someone happens to run a Cliniko report, usually too late to bring them back at any meaningful rate. The practice owner wants reminders and recall to “just happen” without buying yet another standalone tool that does not actually know what is on the schedule.

Why standalone reminder tools and a shared inbox both fall short

Standalone reminder apps tend to run off a flat schedule pulled from a calendar. They do not tell the difference between a new-patient first assessment and a fourth follow-up, between a one-on-one treatment and a group mobility class, or between a clinic the patient knows and one they have never visited. They certainly cannot start a recall sequence the moment a patient becomes lapsed, because they cannot see lapse at all. Worst of all, they often cannot stop a reminder once the appointment has already happened, which leads to awkward “your appointment is tomorrow” messages sent after the visit, and that erodes trust.

A shared inbox is the opposite problem: full of context but impossible to scale. The receptionist remembers that Mrs. K prefers a text over an email and that Mr. R always takes the 7am slot, and writes a personal note. That works for 20 reminders a day. It does not work for 100.

How an always-on reminder and recall engine works

When CRMConnect connects Cliniko to ActiveCampaign, the appointment information ActiveCampaign needs to run both reminders and recall flows through automatically: when the patient last booked, when they last actually attended, which location they visited, how many appointments they have had, and their value over time. When an appointment is attended, marked a no-show, or cancelled, that registers straight away, so reminders can switch themselves off the moment the patient is in the chair. And it knows which location a patient belongs to, so reminders and recall can be branded per clinic without you running two separate setups.

Here is what you can put in place:

Contextual pre-appointment reminders. Each patient with an appointment in the next 48 hours gets a sequence: a confirmation email 48 hours out, an SMS reminder 24 hours out, and a final SMS 2 hours out, each carrying the correct clinic address and parking note.

Reminders that switch off on time. Once an appointment is attended (or marked a no-show or cancelled), the patient is automatically dropped from any active reminder sequence. This is the rule that prevents the embarrassing “your appointment is tomorrow” message landing after the visit already happened.

Lapsed-patient recall. When a patient has not attended for 60 days, has nothing booked, and has agreed to marketing contact, they enter a recall sequence: a gentle check-in at day 60, a more direct rebooking offer at day 75, and a final “we will stop messaging” note at day 90. Each message comes from the clinic the patient actually visited.

Group class reminders. Group mobility classes get their own reminder sequence, 24 hours and 2 hours before, since the timing and message differ from a one-on-one treatment.

Missed-appointment recovery. When a patient no-shows, they get a same-day low-pressure message offering to rebook, then a follow-up a few days later if nothing has been booked.

What you get from this

A 2-location osteopathy practice running this setup typically pulls the no-show rate down from the 13 to 16 percent band into 7 to 9 percent within a quarter, because nearly every appointment gets three relevant touches and the front desk no longer forgets the awkward ones. The lapsed-patient recall sequence usually brings back 10 to 15 percent of patients who have gone past 60 days without a visit, which for a 5-osteopath practice typically means 30 to 50 rebookings a month at an average treatment value of $110 to $140. Reception time spent on reminder texts and recall calls drops by an estimated 8 to 12 hours a week across both locations, which is most of a full-time role of admin time freed up.

Measuring the result

Three reports are worth keeping an eye on:

• Reminder performance: open rate, confirmation rate, and no-show rate by reminder timing.
• Recall performance: patients entered, rebookings within 30 days, and revenue recovered.
• No-show recovery: no-shows per month, how many rebooked within 7 days, and revenue recovered.

The first two pay for the setup on day one. The third is the one to bring to your next leadership meeting.

Why this matters for your practice

Reminders and recall are not a campaign you run once. They are a background process that should run every day, for every patient, whether or not anyone at the front desk remembers. When your live Cliniko schedule drives that process automatically, your no-show rate drops, your lapsed patients come back, and your reception team gets most of a full-time role’s worth of hours back to spend on patients instead of paperwork.

Want to see CRMConnect Cliniko to ActiveCampaign in action? View the API App page.