How PulseMedica reduced no-shows and strengthened patient security with ClickSend’s API

In most industries, a missed message is a minor irritation. In healthcare, it can mean a patient who doesn't show up for care they need, a practice that loses revenue it can't recover and a platform that loses the trust it depends on.

PulseMedica knows this firsthand. The Swiss medical software publisher has built its platform around one core promise: that healthcare professionals can manage patient care simply, securely and without friction, wherever they are. To keep this promise, SMS is a critical thread running through all their communications, keeping appointment reminders, security and real-time patient notifications on track.

Yet their previous SMS provider was falling short on the thing that matters most in healthcare communications: reliability.

The cost of messages that don't arrive

“Some messages weren't being delivered – which is particularly problematic in our context,” the team says. “As a premium solution for medical centres, we couldn't afford for appointment reminders to fail to reach patients, as this reflected poorly on our product.”

Plus, the inconsistent delivery meant appointment confirmations were being missed – and no-shows were increasing. “Missed appointments represent a direct loss of revenue for practices, and no-shows are a major concern for our clients,” the team says.

It's a problem that plagues the industry at scale – missed appointments cost the US healthcare system an estimated $150 billion each year. SMS is one way that providers help reduce no-shows by up to 38% – but of course, that hinges on the messages actually being delivered.

“We needed a far more reliable SMS sending solution, capable of guaranteeing message deliverability and integrating seamlessly with our platform,” says the team.

What healthcare tech actually needs from a messaging partner

The search for a new solution came down to three non-negotiables.

Reliable delivery. In healthcare, there's no room for "probably sent." Appointment reminders, OTP codes for secure document access, urgent practice updates – each of these carries real consequences if it doesn't land. PulseMedica needed a provider that could guarantee high deliverability, not just high volumes.

API-first integration. PulseMedica is a cloud-native product. That means its messaging infrastructure needs to be too. A dashboard-first tool would have created manual overhead and broken the seamless experience their clients expect. What they needed was deep, programmable API integration – one that allowed SMS to function as a native part of the platform rather than an add-on.

Message-level tracking. Knowing a message was sent isn't the same as knowing it was delivered. PulseMedica needed delivery status data directly within their own application, so their team – and their clients – would never have to wonder.

ClickSend met all three. "ClickSend offers a high level of service and reliability," the team says. "For critical use cases like appointment reminders or OTP delivery, this reliability and ease of integration are essential."

How PulseMedica uses ClickSend day-to-day

Today, ClickSend's APIs run in the background of PulseMedica's platform, powering three distinct use cases.

Automated appointment reminders. This is the core use case – and the one with the most direct impact on practice revenue. When a patient is booked in, PulseMedica automatically triggers an SMS reminder ahead of the appointment. Crucially, practices can configure exactly when that reminder goes out, giving each clinic the flexibility to match their own workflow.

Two-factor authentication for secure document sharing. When a doctor needs to share sensitive documents with a patient through PulseMedica, the platform sends a one-time password via SMS. The patient uses that code to access their documents securely – without additional setups, logins or friction.

Group messaging for real-time practice updates. The newest addition to the platform is a manual SMS broadcast feature. If a doctor is unexpectedly unavailable, a practice can instantly notify every affected patient for that day in a single send. What would previously have meant a stack of individual phone calls – or a lot of anxious no-shows – now takes minutes.

The results: what changes when healthcare messaging just works

The most immediate change has been to the day-to-day running of the practices PulseMedica serves. "SMS appointment reminders are today widely embedded in practice – patients are used to them and naturally expect to receive this type of notification before their appointment," the team says. This means less chasing, fewer gaps and more predictable days.

The administrative load has lightened, too. Reminder calls, follow-up messages, manual outreach – the work that used to eat into staff time now happens automatically, in the background.

On the security side, every document shared through PulseMedica is protected by OTP authentication via SMS – a layer of protection the team describes as "an indispensable security baseline for any modern healthcare application."

PulseMedica's platform already reaches beyond Switzerland – supporting practices with international patient bases across neighbouring countries, with the SMS infrastructure to scale further as demand grows.

And as the platform grows, the stakes of every message only get higher. For critical use cases in an industry like healthcare, reliability and ease of integration aren't a nice-to-have. They're essential.