How to Boost Patient Outreach via SMS in Athenahealth?

Introduction

Patient communication in healthcare is shifting rapidly toward text, be it for sending appointment reminders, schedule updates, follow-ups, prescription alerts, etc. And for practices using Athenahealth, SMS is one of the most effective ways to reach patients at scale.

Athena already provides a solid foundation for patient outreach. But many clinics still face challenges with proactive outreach, manual rescheduling, missed calls, language barriers, and last-minute schedule changes. Here, now, the goal is not to replace Athena, but to improve outreach, in a way that does not increase staff workload.

This guide explains:

• How Athena users can strengthen patient outreach using the platform they already have
• Where Athena’s native outreach capabilities reach their limits
• How integrating it with a patient communication & engagement tool can help clinics reach more patients with less manual effort

Why SMS Is Now Central to Patient Engagement

Patient outreach is all about getting the right information to the right patient at the right time. Text messaging has become the preferred channel for this because it offers:

However, sending messages is not enough to make outreach effective. You should be able to:

• Reach every affected patient during schedule changes
• Follow up when calls go unanswered
• Send updates in a format patients will actually see
• Reduce the amount of manual work required from staff

Many Athena users search for “Athena SMS,” “Athena texting,” or “patient outreach in Athenahealth” because they want to expand how far their messages can reach and how efficiently they can communicate with large patient groups.

What Athenahealth Already Offers for Patient Outreach

Athenahealth offers several built-in patient outreach tools. When configured well, these create a strong base for the outreach. 

Appointment Reminders and Visit Notifications

Athena allows practices to send automated reminders via SMS, email, or voice. These reminders help in notifying patients of upcoming appointments, reducing missed visits, and keeping schedules predictable. From an outreach perspective, this ensures that patients are informed in advance and prompted to take action when needed.

Patient Portal Messaging

Through Athena’s portal, clinics can send pre-visit instructions, post-visit information, non-urgent updates, and notices. While this requires patients to log in, it is an important channel for distributing information securely.

Online Scheduling and Telehealth Updates

Athena allows patients to book appointments online and receive visit-related notifications. This reduces the need for making phone calls while ensuring patients receive key updates without staff having to reach out manually.

Automated Messages for Routine Care

Many practices use Athena for recurring outreach for annual exam reminders, preventive screening notices, lab result alerts, and billing and payment reminders. These workflows allow clinics to maintain consistent communication with large patient populations without increasing call volume.

In short: Athenahealth already supports essential patient outreach, but it is still very limited. With the right setup, it can significantly reduce manual communication and ensure patients are regularly notified about care, scheduling, and other essential reminders.

Where Athena’s Outreach Capabilities Reach Their Limits

As clinics scale and patient volume increases, certain outreach scenarios become difficult to manage using Athena alone. Here are some scenarios where Athena’s outreach features reach their limits: 

Provider Schedule Changes

When a provider is unavailable or clinic hours change, staff often must call patients individually. There is no quick way to send targeted SMS to only the affected appointments. This makes it very difficult to reach out to all the patients and is quite labor-intensive.

Language Barriers in Patient Communication

Athena’s native messaging does not fully support multilingual outreach. Clinics that have patients from diverse populations may struggle to notify all patients in their preferred language.

Missed Calls and After-Hours Requests

When patients call outside business hours or during busy periods, many calls go unanswered. These often include:

• Appointment requests
• Refill questions
• Time-sensitive administrative needs

Without automated follow-up, these outreach opportunities are often lost.

One-Way Messaging with Manual Updates

While using Athena, you can send reminders, handling confirmations, cancellations, or follow-up actions still requires staff to manually update schedules and records. This slows down communication workflows.

Communication from Multiple Phone Numbers

Messages often come from a number different from the clinic’s main line. This can slow down response rates.

Extending Athena to Improve Patient Outreach

While Athena may offer limited patient outreach features, it is still a great EMR, and that is why many practices choose to extend it with a communication layer that focuses specifically on outbound patient communication and outreach, instead of replacing it. 

If your goal is to:

• Reach more patients with less manual effort
• Handle high-volume communication scenarios like schedule changes
• Automate routine follow-ups
• Keep all outreach connected to patient records

Emitrr is one example of a platform designed to integrate directly with Athenahealth and enhance SMS-based outreach workflows.

How Emitrr Complements Athena for Patient Outreach

By adding Emitrr to Athenahealth, you can address all the gaps that you may encounter with Athena while trying to improve patient outreach. Here’s how Emitrr complements Athenahealth:

Schedule-Based Texting: Scaling Patient Outreach

One of the most challenging outreach tasks for clinics is managing sudden schedule changes, and by adding Emitrr to Athena, this can be tackled very smoothly. 

With Emitrr’s schedule-based texting:

• Appointment data is pulled directly from Athena
• Appointments can be filtered by provider, date range, or patient group
• Targeted messages can be sent instantly when:
  • A provider is unavailable
  • Appointments need to be rescheduled
  • Clinic hours change

So instead of calling patients one by one, staff can:

• Select specific patients
• Or message all patients within a defined date range or for a specific provider in one go.

This allows clinics to notify large patient groups in minutes, while keeping all updates recorded in Athena.

After-Hours Patient Outreach with AI

When clinics are closed, patients still call, text, and look for answers. Emitrr AI ensures these interactions don’t go unanswered by automatically responding to after-hours inquiries for FAQs, appointment requests, and prescription refills. If the request can be handled immediately, the AI assists the patient; if staff action is needed, it creates a case inside Athena for follow-up the next day. This turns after-hours messages into structured outreach, making sure every patient contact is captured and acknowledged.

Learn more about Athenahealth + Emitrr integration:

Reducing No-Shows with Automated Reminders

Emitrr pulls appointment data from Athena and sends SMS or email reminders based on a customizable cadence, such as days before, hours before, or same day. Unlike basic reminders, patients can reply with “Confirm” or “Cancel,” and their response is automatically written back into Athena. This closes the loop between outreach and scheduling, reducing the need to update appointments manually while also significantly lowering no-show rates.

Automating Review Collection After Visits

Once an appointment is marked as completed in Athena, Emitrr can automatically send a follow-up message asking for feedback or a review. Because the trigger comes directly from Athena’s visit status, staff do not need to remember or manually send requests. This allows you to consistently do post-visit outreach and gather more patient reviews without adding workload.

No-Show Follow-Ups and Patient Reactivation

When a patient misses an appointment, Emitrr can automatically send a follow-up message offering rescheduling options. Similarly, clinics can define rules to reach out to inactive patients, such as those who haven’t visited in three, six, or twelve months. These workflows are driven by Athena data, ensuring outreach is timely, relevant, and targeted rather than generic.

Bulk SMS and Email Campaigns from Athena Data

Emitrr allows clinics to run bulk outreach campaigns using patient and appointment data synced from Athena. Practices can segment patients by date range, provider, visit type, or other criteria and send announcements, recalls, or care reminders at scale. This makes it easy to communicate important updates without exporting lists or relying on separate marketing tools.

Missed-Call Outreach and Automated Call Handling

When a patient calls, and the call is missed, Emitrr automatically sends a follow-up text acknowledging the call and offering next steps. For common requests, such as appointment booking or requesting prescription refills, you can also add AI workflows that can either schedule directly inside Athena or create a task for staff to review. This ensures every inbound call triggers outbound outreach, reducing front-desk load and lost opportunities.

Multilingual Outreach

Emitrr enables one-to-one texting and calling in multiple languages, allowing practices to reach patients more effectively regardless of language preferences.

Using the Clinic’s Existing Phone Number

Emitrr allows you to use your existing phone number to be able to manage patient outreach and responses from a single phone. Since messages are sent from the clinic’s primary number, outreach is more recognizable.

FAQs

Conclusion

Athenahealth already helps you manage care, but how well are you actually reaching patients? If missed calls go unanswered, schedule changes take hours to communicate, or follow-ups still depend on manual work, your outreach is leaving opportunities on the table. 

The fastest way to fix this isn’t switching systems, it’s adding a smarter SMS layer with Emitrr that works with Athena to automate reminders, follow up instantly, and keep every message logged where your team already works.

If you want fewer no-shows, faster responses, and simpler patient communication, it’s time to see how your outreach could work better in practice. Book a quick demo to learn more.