Run the Reminder Scan Without Duplicates

Who / when: this one runs itself. A scheduled background job — the reminder scan — wakes up on a regular cadence and looks across the facility for things a patient should be reminded about: an upcoming appointment, a scheduled telehealth consult, a follow-up or a care nudge. For each one that is due a reminder, it sends a single, content-free notification on the patient’s chosen channel. The defining feature is that it runs safely twice: the scan deduplicates as it goes, so a reminder that has already been sent is never sent again — even if the scan runs twice in quick succession. The patient is the one who feels the result; no staff member presses anything for this to happen.

There is no “Run scan” button in the day-to-day interface, and that is intentional — this is a cron-driven sweep, not a screen you click. It runs automatically on its schedule. An Administrator can also trigger a scan on demand from the notifications administration surface (the same scan the schedule runs), which is mainly useful for verifying behaviour; in normal operation you never need to.

1. System (scheduled) — on its cadence, the reminder scan runs. It gathers everything currently due a reminder — appointments and care items coming up — and prepares a nudge for each.
2. System — before sending, it checks what has already been reminded. Anything that was sent on an earlier pass is deduplicated and skipped; only genuinely new, not-yet-reminded items are sent this time.
3. System — for each new item, a content-free notification goes out on the patient’s preferred channel (WhatsApp, SMS, USSD or email). As with every outbound message, it carries no clinical detail — just that something is due and a prompt to sign in. This is the same delivery machinery described in Deliver an Audited Notification Wave.
4. Patient — sees the nudge on their phone, and the matching entry on their portal Reminders feed once signed in. The scan reports back a simple tally of what it did this pass — how many it fired, how many it deduped, and how many it skipped — so a re-run is provably safe.

Note

Running it again is simply harmless. If the scan fires, then fires a second time moments later, the second pass finds that the first already covered those items and sends nothing new — the patient is never double-nudged about the same appointment. That property is what makes a scheduled, automatic sweep safe to run as often as the cadence calls for.

Tip

Patients never build this list themselves — Veona derives it from their real appointments, consults and care plan, and the scan keeps it current. Patients can see the gathered result any time on the portal Reminders feed; see See the Reminders Feed in the Portal. They can also choose which channel the nudges arrive on under their portal Settings.

What happens next: the scan goes back to sleep until its next scheduled run, by which point new appointments and care items may have appeared — those get reminded on the next pass, while everything already covered stays quietly deduplicated. The patient receives timely, content-free nudges and never a repeat; the full detail always waits behind their sign-in. It is a piece of plumbing the facility never has to think about, doing the right thing on its own.

Follow the trail

• Related: See the Reminders Feed in the Portal
• Related: Deliver an Audited Notification Wave