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Two-way SMS

We gave an AI your clinic’s phone number. Then we spent longer on what stops it.

It answers at 11:47 at night. It offers real slots and books them through the same validator your front desk uses, so it cannot be talked into an appointment that does not exist. That part demonstrates well in thirty seconds. The part worth paying for is the cage around it — and this page is mostly about the cage.

Ask what it would say How reminders differ

Conversation governor Live

  • Turn cap 60 messages in one conversation, and then it is over
  • Session window 30 min a thread that goes quiet does not stay open behind you
  • Abuse score 100 auto-block at the threshold, decaying ten points an hour
  • STOP Immediate honoured automatically, and your clinic is contractually not allowed to switch it off

Twilio — every incoming message verified as genuine Inbound · status · fallback

What it may say

The most private message we send is the one we send by accident.

Our reminder shortens when the full text would run past a single segment. That is a billing rule. It happens to produce the message that gives away the least — and a patient protected by coincidence is not protected. So here is the test, and here is who has to make the call.

8:00

Tuesday, 21 October

Messages now

Hi Marco, Bow Valley Clinic appt 11-12 10:15 with Dr A. Chen. Reply CANCEL to cancel, RESCHEDULE to change, STOP to opt out.

Nobody unlocked anything. This is what the notification shows to whoever is nearest the phone.

  1. Who it is addressed to

    A first name on a lock screen ties the rest of the message to a person. On a household phone, a work phone or a phone on a desk, that is the whole disclosure in two words.

  2. Where they are going

    A clinic name is not neutral. Plenty of them contain the diagnosis. If yours does, that single line tells a stranger something the patient may not have told their family.

  3. Who they are seeing

    A named practitioner is searchable. A specialist’s name is a condition with an extra step, and the extra step takes four seconds.

Write it for a phone lying face-up on a table A reminder has to be useful to a patient standing at a bus stop and useless to the person standing behind them. What is left when the three phrases above go dark — a date, a time, and three words the patient can reply with — is still enough to act on. Decide what your reminders may contain, once, with the whole team, and then go and read what yours say today.

The message above is the worked example from Reminder schedules — a fictional clinic, patient and doctor, used identically on both pages. SMS is not an encrypted channel and Qlynic does not pretend otherwise; under our terms the clinic is the sender and holds the consent, which is exactly why the wording is yours to set.

When it does not arrive

A message that fails is a patient who does not know.

The carrier reports what happened to every message — queued, sent, delivered, undelivered, failed. It is easy to keep the first three and lose interest in the last two, and that is how a clinic ends up with an empty chair and no idea why.

Delivery ledger — 8:00 reminder run Reported by the carrier

  1. +1 403 ••• 4192 Queued Sent Delivered
  2. +1 403 ••• 7715 Queued Sent Delivered
  3. +1 587 ••• 2043 Queued Sent Delivered
  4. +1 403 ••• 8860 Queued Sent Undelivered

    Landline. No handset was ever going to receive it, and no amount of resending changes that.

  5. +1 825 ••• 3317 Queued Sent Delivered
  6. +1 403 ••• 5521 Queued Sent Delivered

  1. Sent is not delivered

    Two different events with two different names. “Sent” means the carrier accepted it from us. “Delivered” means a handset acknowledged it. The gap between them is where the empty chairs are.

  2. Delivered is not read

    A delivery receipt is a handset saying it received bytes. Nobody anywhere in the chain has promised you that a human looked at the screen, and no vendor who tells you otherwise is reading the same log.

  3. A failure has a reason

    And the reason decides the response. A landline needs a phone call. A carrier block needs a different channel. A typo needs the chart fixed, or it will fail again next week and the week after.

The unsent list is visible rather than silent That sentence is on our dependencies page as a public commitment about what happens when the carrier is down, and it is the whole posture: if a text does not land, the clinic finds out from us rather than from the empty chair. Email reminders keep going in the meantime, because they do not travel over the same wire.

Numbers above are fictional and partly masked. Qlynic records delivery status — see the privacy page, which names it as a stored category alongside opt-out records. What Qlynic does not do is quietly retry a number that cannot receive text messages; a landline is not a delivery problem, it is a chart problem.

The allowance

Nobody runs out on an average day. You run out on a Thursday.

Eight hundred messages per doctor per month, refreshed on the first, no rollover. Spread across thirty days that is generous and nobody thinks about it again — which is the problem, because sends do not arrive in equal daily portions.

One doctor · 800 included Illustrative shape, not a customer’s month

Twenty-nine ordinary days and one cancelled clinic on the Thursday of week four. The running total crosses the allowance on that day and finishes the month at 978. Nothing in that month was unreasonable and nothing in it was planned.

  1. A reminder is one. A conversation is several.

    Every message the clinic sends counts against the allowance. A reminder is one of them. A late-night exchange that ends in a booking is four or five, and it is worth every one — but it is not one.

  2. 160 characters is one. 161 is two.

    That is a carrier rule, not ours, and it is why the reminder shortens itself rather than quietly billing you twice for the same sentence. The short version is also the one that gives away least, which is the accident the section above is about.

  3. It refreshes. It does not accumulate.

    A quiet January does not pay for a busy February. The meter starts again on the first of the month, at eight hundred, per doctor, every time.

It stops itself before it becomes an invoice Go past the allowance and the extra is metered at the posted rate and billed afterwards — no tier jump, and nothing switched off in the middle of a month. Qlynic also caps spend automatically: if an automation misfires at three in the morning it stops itself before it becomes a bill you have to argue about. That protection has been in the terms from the beginning and almost nowhere else. It is written down here now.

Allowance, refresh, rollover, overage and the automatic cap are all as published on the pricing page — if they change there they change here. The thirty-day chart above is a model built to show a shape, not a customer’s data, and no real clinic’s usage was used to draw it.

Before you switch it on

It will be asked things it must not answer. Decide now what happens next.

An AI on a clinic line is a booking assistant. Patients do not know that, and nobody reads a disclaimer before they type. Somebody will send your line something clinical at two in the morning, and the only question that matters is whether you had already decided what happens to it.

Inbound · 02:14 One message

i’ve had chest pain since about 4am, should i come in tomorrow

No reply composed

There is no good sentence for a machine to send here, and the empty space above is deliberate. What goes in it is a decision your clinic makes once, in daylight, with everybody in the room.

  1. It will not triage

    Nothing a booking assistant does is a clinical judgement, and no reply it could compose to the message above would be a safe one. Qlynic does not claim to recognise an emergency, because it does not.

  2. It will not consent on your behalf

    Under our terms the clinic is the sender and holds the CASL and health-information consent. That does not transfer to a model because the model is the one typing.

  3. It will not invent a slot

    It books through the same validator your front desk uses, which is why it cannot be argued into an opening that does not exist — and also why it will refuse a patient who is certain there is room.

  4. It will not replace the phone

    A line that answers in four seconds is not a line that answers everything. Somebody still picks up, and the point of the assistant is that they are picking up less often, not that they stopped.

Write the sentence before you need it Whatever your line says when a message turns clinical, write it now, agree it with the whole clinic, and make sure whoever opens in the morning knows where those messages went overnight. A rule invented at two in the morning by whoever happens to be awake is not a rule.

A line that answers in four seconds is easy to sell and easy to regret. The four seconds were never the hard part.

Talk to us first Read the terms