🎞️ View video tutorial: Avoiding SMS overage charges
As part of your TELUS Collaborative Health Record (CHR) monthly subscription, every licensed provider can send 1000 SMS messages from the TELUS Collaborative Health Record (CHR), per month for free. If the number of SMS messages exceeds your monthly limit, we charge every additional SMS message at $0.10 each.
Through the CHR, you can send appointment reminders, Qnaires, patient portal messages and other notifications via SMS messages to your patients. You can, therefore, very easily reach your monthly limit of SMS messages.
💡 Tips to avoid exceeding 1000 SMS messages per month:
Keep your SMS notifications short and simple. Patient variables, numbers, symbols, and spaces in your text messages count as characters and can add up.
Because telephone carriers count one SMS message as 160 characters, make sure your SMS messages do not exceed 160 characters.
Use any free online SMS length calculator to ensure that your message is less than 160 characters long.
When possible, use email notifications (which are free) instead of SMS notifications.
When you add or modify a patient’s demographics, make sure to ask the patient what their preferred method of notification is. If they are fine with just email, select Email Only.
Use the SMS Sent Analytics dashboard to track your SMS usage. If you do not have this dashboard, contact the CHR support team.
📌 Note: When you create or modify an SMS notification, a warning message appears when the text exceeds two or more SMS messages (i.e., when the character count exceeds 320).
Updated July 5, 2023