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Patient messaging & SMS

Fertiligent gives your clinic a single place to hold two-way conversations with patients — in the portal, over text (SMS), and from inbound email — with optional AI assistance that drafts replies for your team to review. This page covers how messaging works and how the AI fits into your day.

Conversations​

Messages are organized into threads, so a conversation with a patient stays together over time. Within a thread your team can:

  • send and receive messages, with file attachments;
  • reuse templates for common replies, so answers stay consistent;
  • see read status and who said what;
  • send a bulk message to many patients at once (for example a clinic-wide notice).

Patients can reach your staff and admins; staff can message anyone. Everything lives in one inbox in the portal.

AI-assisted replies​

When AI messaging is enabled, incoming patient messages can be analyzed and a suggested reply drafted for your team. The AI is built around a review queue and a simple risk assessment so a person always stays in control:

  • Risk level. Each message is assessed as safe, needs review, or escalate. Anything sensitive is routed to a human rather than answered automatically.
  • Review queue. Suggested replies land in a queue where staff can approve, edit and send, reject, re-run the analysis, or escalate to a colleague.
  • Draft assist. Even outside the queue, staff can ask for a draft reply to a thread and edit it before sending.
  • Pause per conversation. You can pause AI on any single thread — for example a delicate conversation you want to handle entirely by hand — and resume it later.

AI modes​

How much the AI does is controlled per clinic by a mode:

ModeWhat happens
OffThe AI does no drafting; staff handle every message.
Review queue onlyThe AI drafts replies, but nothing is sent until a staff member approves it.
Safe auto-sendLow-risk, high-confidence replies can be sent automatically; anything else still goes to the queue or a human.

Whichever mode you use, sensitive messages are escalated to a person, and every AI action is recorded so you can audit what happened.

Text messaging (SMS)​

Patients can also reach your clinic by text, and the same assistant that answers your phone line handles the conversation. A few things are specific to SMS:

  • Identity and consent come first. Before any personal health information is shared over text, the patient must both verify their identity (by date of birth) and give explicit consent to receive health information by text. A verified patient who hasn't consented gets a short message asking them to opt in — never their private details.
  • Opting in and out. Patients can reply STOP to opt out at any time (which also withdraws their consent to receive health information by text) and START to opt back in. Replying HELP returns help text. These are handled automatically.
  • Nothing gets lost. A text sent to a number that isn't set up for conversations still gets a courteous auto-reply pointing the patient to call or use the portal, rather than vanishing.

Your team can also send a text to a patient or prospect — for example a referral-received confirmation — from the portal, subject to the same consent rules.

Availability​

Messaging, AI-assisted replies, and SMS are each enabled per clinic. Because text messaging with real patients depends on identity verification, consent, and the required carrier agreements being in place, SMS is rolled out in a controlled way — ask your Fertiligent contact about enabling it for your clinic.