How did we get here?

Today, in a world where web-access is rarely farther away than our back pocket, no one thinks much about the wonder of banking on the internet. It was a different story back in 2000, which is where the Solutionreach story begins.

It started with a big idea: that communication between businesses and their customers should be simple and widely available.

Though SMS texting hadn’t yet taken off in America, Jim Higgins believed that he could leverage technology to make his idea a reality–and he did. Higgins and a small team of innovative geniuses created a company they called Communitect Inc. and jump-started the mobile banking revolution. Using “Communication Architecture”, Communitect correlated with cell phone carriers to connect banks with their customers via SMS text message.

2005 brought a new feature from Smile Reminder that took patient engagement far beyond appointment reminders and patient emailing: Automated Patient Recare.

Dentists desperately needed to keep a full schedule and retain their patients, without wasting so much time calling and re-calling to get them in for routine or follow-up visits.

Postcards were getting more expensive and less effective, so the Smile Reminder team created automated messaging that contacted patients when they were due or past-due for an appointment.

From that point on, patient engagement was just as much about retaining patients as it was about reminding them.

The dental industry had treated Smile Reminder well, but Jim Higgins recognized that dental patients weren’t the only ones that needed better communication with their providers. For the first time since 2001, Smile Reminder stepped outside of the dental chair. They attended an Ophthalmology conference where they signed up the first non-dental client in nearly 6 years.

Smile Reminder eventually became the standard for patient engagement among optometrists, cosmetic surgeons, and dermatologists.

By 2011, Smile Reminder had evolved far beyond just a patient messaging service. They now offered a robust platform of high-tech patient engagement tools, and Jim Higgins recognized that the company name no longer conveyed everything they had become.

He also realized that a dental-driven name like "Smile Reminder" wouldn’t make much sense to other healthcare practitioners seeking the many solutions that the platform now provided.

Thus, Solutionreach was born.

Shortly thereafter, Solutionreach made headlines when they announced that they would be the only automated patient communication system to include customizable phone messaging. Even today, unlimited phone messaging remains a substantial service differentiation.