Halaxy: campaigns for patients not seen in 6 months

Halaxy doesn't hide this feature. Its campaigns guide opens with the sentence "Create an ongoing email campaign to encourage patients who have not visited in the last 6 months to schedule a check-up" and then shows you how. The mechanism is a report that becomes a mailing list, which is a good way to build it because the report is reusable and the campaign can repeat.

Labels below are quoted from support.halaxy.com (Australian help centre), both articles updated 10 September 2026.

How Halaxy campaigns work

"In Halaxy, you can use campaigns to send mass email and/or SMS communications to patients or contacts. By running a report and using it as a mailing list, campaigns allow you to target a specific audience, then use a communication template to create the message to send to the audience" (Guide to campaigns). Halaxy's own list of uses includes "Recalls for patients who have not attended in a while". All users and access levels can do it; "SMS campaigns require Halaxy credits".

Step 1: the template

Settings → General → Template Settings → Communication templates → Create Template → Email or SMS. Give it a title, a subject (email), and the content. Halaxy's tip: "Use dynamic terms to personalise the content to each recipient", which is how the patient's first name and your practitioner's name get in.

For the content itself, what to text a client who hasn't been in and the templates. Keep the SMS under 160 characters and put the practitioner's name in it, because a recall from "Sam" gets answered and a recall from "the practice" gets ignored.

Step 2: the report that becomes the audience

Halaxy's example, quoted: "you need to create a report to generate a list of your group's patients whose last attended appointment was 6 months before today's date. In the sidebar, click Reports > Appointment. On the top right, click New Report. For the report, configure the following filters: Report Type: Attendance; Length: Equals 6 months since last attended appointment. Click Run."

The "Useful campaigns" article adds the wider version: "Patients who haven't made an appointment in at least 3 months: Appointment / Attendance / Length equals 3 months or greater since last appointment" (Useful campaigns for your practice). "Equals 6 months" catches people as they cross the line; "3 months or greater" catches the whole backlog. Use the second one for the first pass, then switch to the first and let it repeat.

Note what the report keys on: "last attended appointment". A cancellation or no-show doesn't count as attended, which is what you want.

Step 3: send, and repeat

Create the campaign from the report, pick the template, choose email or SMS, and schedule it. Halaxy's line on repeating campaigns is the useful part: "When you set campaigns to repeat, the audience is automatically updated every time. For example, if you set a campaign to repeat every day but to only send to patients with an appointment 2 days away, you'll only send the campaign to each patient once, because tomorrow's campaign will have a different audience!"

Apply that to reactivation: a daily-repeating campaign on "Equals 6 months since last attended appointment" sends each patient one message on the day they hit 6 months, and never again from that campaign. That's a rolling recall, and it's the right shape (how a reactivation campaign actually runs). A second campaign at "Equals 7 months" gives you the follow-up. Stop there; two well-timed messages is the cadence, not four.

Campaigns can also attach a patient form, send from a dedicated SMS number, go to a patient's contacts, or be sent on behalf of another practitioner. The last one is how you make the message come from the clinician they saw rather than the practice.

Exporting a list instead

If you'd rather have a spreadsheet, Halaxy reports can be exported, but the columns of a patient export weren't documented on the pages this build read, so that part isn't quoted here. The campaign route doesn't need the export.

The setting that decides recall or marketing

The report and the send are the easy bit. What makes a Halaxy campaign a recall rather than marketing is the template's content, not anything in Halaxy. A message about the appointment that patient is due for, tied to what they had with you, with no offer, sits in the lane where the OAIC says "it is reasonable to imply the patient's consent" (OAIC). Put a promotion in the template and the same audience needs consent you can point to, because the audience was built from health information.

The Spam Act's identification and unsubscribe rules apply either way (ACMA), and neither the Spam Act nor the ACMA is named in the fetched Halaxy pages. Put the practice name and "Reply STOP" in the SMS template, and make sure the sending number is one where a STOP reaches a person. The one-question test sorts the lane in ten seconds.

What to do on Halaxy

Build the "3 months or greater" report, send the first 50 most-recent patients a personal recall from their practitioner, and watch the replies that day. Then set the daily "Equals 6 months" campaign and let Halaxy catch each patient as they drift. It's one of the cleaner native setups on this list. The reply handling is still yours.