Industry
Handwritten mail for healthcare practices
Healthcare has the clearest use case for handwritten mail and the strictest limits on what it may say. The trick is that those two things are compatible: the most effective recall letter is also the one that discloses nothing.
Three lists worth writing to
Recalls and reviews
Patients due for a check, a screening or a review. SMS gets ignored, email gets filtered. A written note gets read, and it is easy to keep it clinically silent.
Dormant patients
People who have not been in for two years. Most have not switched practices - they have simply not got around to it. A written prompt is the cheapest reactivation available to a practice.
Referrers
GPs who send you work. A written note acknowledging a referral is rare enough to be remembered, and referral patterns are extremely sticky once established.
Mail is the second attempt here, not the first
Search for patient recall and nearly everything that comes back is SMS - sent by the practice software, costing cents, and working well enough that no honest page about mail should pretend otherwise. Keep it. A letter is not a replacement for a reminder that arrives the afternoon before.
What SMS does not do is reach the patient whose mobile number is three phones old, the one who opted out of messages in 2023, or the one who has now ignored four in a row. That is the list worth putting on paper: not everybody due, just the people the cheap channel has stopped reaching.
Two further limits worth knowing before you plan around this. We cannot accept clinical information, so anything that depends on it stays inside your software. And the minimum run is 100 pieces, which a single-practitioner overdue list may not reach in a month - combine a quarter, or ring them.
A recall and a dormant patient are not the same list
Practices usually merge the two, and the letter suffers for it. A recall goes to someone who still considers themselves your patient and is simply due: the address is probably current and the message is a date. A dormant patient has not been in for two years and may have stopped thinking of the practice as theirs. One letter is a reminder. The other is an invitation, and it has to acknowledge the gap instead of writing as though nothing happened.
The split changes the economics as well as the wording. Recalls are a large, repeating list, which is exactly where an automated reminder belongs. The dormant list is finite, worth more per person, and the easiest place to justify paper - the same reasoning as any other reactivation run, applied to a patient file rather than a customer one. If you want it happening every month without anyone remembering to start it, that is a standing batch.
Referrers are a third list again, and a retention problem rather than a recall one. A GP who sends you two patients a month is worth more than most individual names on your file, and hears from you almost entirely through correspondence generated by software. A short note that names no patient and asks for nothing is unusual enough to be remembered - thanking people at volume is the general version of the problem.
Write it so a stranger could read it
The design rule for every piece of patient mail is simple: assume the wrong person opens it. A partner, a flatmate, a parent, a child. If that person learns anything about the recipient’s health from the envelope or the letter, the piece is wrong - regardless of what the Privacy Act technically permits.
In practice that means:
- No clinic name that discloses a specialty on the outside of the envelope.
- No condition, medication, test or procedure named anywhere in the letter.
- “It is time to book an appointment” rather than any reason.
- No windows. A plain handwritten envelope is genuinely the safest format.
Australian Privacy Principle 7 also governs when health service providers may use patient information for direct marketing, and the rules are tighter than for other organisations. What the Australian rules actually say.
What we receive is a name and an address
The same rule applies to the spreadsheet as to the letter. We need the recipient’s name, their postal address, and whatever merge fields are actually going to be written onto the paper. We do not need a condition, a procedure, an appointment type or a practitioner’s specialty in a column heading, and we would rather not have them.
Every extra field is one more thing to transmit, store and destroy, and none of them make the letter work better. If a column is not being written onto paper, it should not leave the practice. Your list is used only for your campaign and is returned or destroyed on request. We hold no health-sector certification and will not imply otherwise - our full position on data handling.
What the published benchmark says
The series publishes a healthcare figure. Read it as an average across everything from insurers to hospital groups, not as a forecast for one practice’s recall run.
- Healthcare
- 4.09%
- House list - people who have already bought from you or given you their details
- 5–9%
- Prospect list - cold names who have no relationship with you
- 2.0–4.4%
These are United States figures, self-reported by the marketers who ran the campaigns, and there is no equivalent Australian series. Treat them as the shape of the thing rather than a forecast of your result - the honest use is to compare channels and list types against each other, not to predict a number for your campaign.
The rows underneath it are the more useful pair. A patient file is a house list - almost everyone a practice writes to has already sat in the chair, which is the higher-responding category and the reason the arithmetic works at all. Keeping people from drifting is the general case.
Typical practice volumes
A 70-word recall note in a handwritten envelope.
| Quantity | Per piece | Campaign total | Volume tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| 200 | $3.24 | $713 | 150+ pieces |
| 500 | $2.67 | $1,469 | 500+ pieces |
| 1,500 | $2.38 | $3,921 | 1,500+ pieces |
| 4,000 | $2.27 | $10,007 | 2,500+ pieces |
Indicative only, including GST, 70 words per piece, with a handwritten envelope, excluding postage. Full pricing and calculator.
A dormant list of 500 at that length is about $2.67 a piece, $1,335 for the run before postage and GST.
Questions from practices
Can you handle patient data?
We can handle a name and address list for the purpose of writing and posting your mail. We would strongly advise against sending us clinical information, and there is no reason to: a recall letter does not need to name a condition, and one that does creates a privacy problem in the recipient’s letterbox as well as in our systems.
What should a recall letter actually say?
That it is time for an appointment, who it is from, and how to book. Nothing about why. Anyone who might see the envelope or the letter - a housemate, a family member, a carer - is entitled to learn nothing about the recipient’s health from it.
Is a handwritten envelope a privacy risk?
It is a privacy improvement. A window-faced envelope with a clinic logo on it announces where the patient has been before it is opened. A plain handwritten envelope announces nothing.
Do you write to referrers as well as patients?
Yes, and for specialist practices it is often the better list. Referrer relationships are worth a great deal and are maintained almost entirely by correspondence, most of which is automated discharge summaries nobody reads.
Should we mail everyone who is due, or only the patients SMS has missed?
Only the ones SMS has missed. Mailing everybody due duplicates a reminder that already cost you a few cents and arrived on time, and it is the fastest way to make this channel look expensive. The list worth printing is the patients whose number has gone dead, who opted out of messages, or who have now ignored three or four in a row - the people your cheap channel can no longer reach.
Can a letter go out as each patient becomes due, rather than in a batch?
Not one at a time, and not automatically - there is no integration with any practice management system. What works is a run on a cycle: export everyone who crossed the overdue mark this month and send it as one batch. The minimum is 100 pieces, so a small practice may need to combine a quarter rather than a month.
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Start with the dormant list
Everyone who has not been in for two years. Tell us the volume and we will price a recall run - and help you word it so it discloses nothing.