Collections
SMS messaging
ArkCloud can text patients a few transactional messages - a failed scheduled payment, a portal invitation link and statement notices - when an SMS provider is configured. It sends no payment reminders and has no SMS collection campaigns.
Written for: Collections managers · Compliance reviewers · Administrators
Is SMS available here?
Without the provider credentials nothing is texted, and a send fails with an error rather than pretending to succeed.
What is texted
| Field or control | What it means |
|---|---|
| Failed-payment notice | Texted by the payment-plan job when a scheduled AutoPay instalment fails. It gives the amount that could not be processed and asks the patient to sign in to the portal or contact the billing office; it carries no account number or failure reason. Receipts are emailed, not texted, and no payment or payment-plan reminder is sent by text or email. |
| Portal invitation link | Sent when staff invite a patient to the portal by SMS: a link only, no code. It goes through the same consent check and sending hours as the other texts, described below. If either refuses, no text is sent, no link is issued, and staff see Not sent with the reason. |
| Statement notice | Sent by a statement run when the patient's preferences allow it. |
Consent and opt-out
| Field or control | What it means |
|---|---|
| Consent check | Every text listed above, and any text staff send to a patient from a notification, checks consent first. Consent is read from the patient's SMS consent flag, their contact preferences and the TCPA consent register; any opt-out in any of them wins, and a patient with no consent recorded anywhere is not texted. A text with no patient attached is refused, because there is no consent to check. A refused text is recorded in the audit log with its reason; a refused notification text is recorded on the notification as failed, with the reason, never as delivered. |
| Portal opt-out | A patient who ticks Do not text in the patient portal turns their SMS consent flag off, so the audited SMS path stops texting them. Un-ticking it does not turn consent back on. |
| STOP replies | Processed once Twilio's inbound webhook is set to /api/webhooks/twilio-sms. A reply of STOP, STOPALL, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END, QUIT, REVOKE or OPTOUT turns the SMS consent flag off, and sets Do not text, for every patient with that number, in every organisation, so the audited SMS path stops texting them. START does not turn consent back on. ArkCloud sends no reply; Twilio sends its own confirmation and blocks further texts from that number. The patient's communication preference is also set to Do not text, so collections contact rules refuse texts too. |
| Sending hours | For the texts above: 8am-9pm in your organisation's timezone - the scheduling policy's, then the appointment-reminder policy's. With neither set, it must be 8am-9pm on both the East and West coasts. Outside the window a text is refused, not held for later. A verification code the patient has just asked for is exempt from the hours, not from consent. |
What is not implemented
There are no SMS collection campaigns, no collection message templates to choose from, no short links, no click tracking, no portal double opt-in and no A/B testing. The"Send SMS" action offered in collections escalation rules does not send anything - it reports that it does not run automatically yet (see supervisor tools). Earlier versions of this page described an SMS campaign product with guaranteed TCPA compliance; that product does not exist.