Features
Reminders and recalls
SMS and email that go out on their own — proved against the consent the patient actually gave, held back during quiet hours, and recorded on the patient's thread.
Reminders are the cheapest thing a clinic can do about no-shows, and recalls are the cheapest thing it can do about revenue. Both are also the fastest way to get a GDPR complaint if the sending is careless, so most of the work here is in what Orla refuses to send.
Reminders
Sent before the appointment on the clinic's own schedule. The patient can confirm, reschedule or cancel from the message itself, and a cancellation goes straight into the waitlist, where the freed slot is offered to everybody waiting who matches it.
That last link is the point. A reminder that produces a cancellation two days out has not cost the clinic an appointment — it has converted a no-show into a filled slot, provided something is watching the waitlist. Something is.
Recalls
For patients who should come back and have not: a care plan with sessions left and nothing booked, an annual review that has come round, a course of treatment that stopped halfway.
Consent is not one switch
This is where systems get it wrong, so it is worth being exact.
A marketing consent is not a transactional consent. An appointment reminder is transactional: the patient has an appointment, and telling them about it is part of providing the care they asked for. A recall campaign or a review request is marketing, and it goes only to patients who agreed to marketing specifically.
Orla does not leave that distinction to whoever writes the send. The template decides the consent it requires, in one place, and every send is checked against it. When a new marketing template is added later, it inherits the marketing rule automatically rather than going out under reminder consent because nobody remembered to say otherwise.
A patient who has not granted the required consent — or who granted it and later revoked it — is not messaged. The send is refused and the reason recorded, so a clinic asking "why did this person not get their reminder" gets an answer instead of a shrug.
Quiet hours
A text at eleven at night is not a reminder, it is a nuisance. Orla holds noisy channels — SMS, WhatsApp, voice — during the clinic's quiet hours and tells the sender when it will go instead. Email is asynchronous by nature and is not gated this way; nobody is woken by an email.
There is one deliberate exception. A waitlist offer with a 30-minute life is urgent by construction — holding it until morning would mean offering an appointment that has already passed — so it is allowed through the quiet-hours gate. It is not allowed through the consent gate. Urgency is a reason to send at an awkward hour, never a reason to message somebody who said no.
Compliance replies always go out
If a patient texts STOP, the acknowledgement is sent even though consent has just been withdrawn. Regulators require the confirmation precisely at the moment consent is gone, so that one path bypasses the consent guard on purpose. It is the only one that does.
Everything lands on the thread
Every message — sent, held, or refused — is written to the patient's own message thread with the actor recorded on each row: the person, the automation, or the system. When a patient asks what the clinic has sent them, the clinic can show them, rather than reconstructing it from three inboxes and a phone.