Ask a clinic how it gets weight-loss patients to reorder and the answer is usually a person: the front desk texts people when it has been about a month. That works until the list passes a hundred patients.
A reorder is better treated as a mechanism: a date the system knows, a nudge sent on that date, and a purchase that takes less effort than ignoring the nudge. Here is how that mechanism runs in our app, from a delivered parcel to the next paid order, and the three places it breaks when a clinic sets it up halfway. For why the timing matters, see why patients quit at week nine.
It starts with the supply length on the product option
Every treatment you sell is a product with options: 2.5 mg, four-week supply, $249. Each option carries its own price, dose, frequency, a supply length in days, weeks or months, and the number of injections in that supply, set once on the product page.
The supply length is the one fact everything downstream reads. The countdown in the app, the reminder, the at-risk flag on your dashboard and the auto-refill cadence all turn it into a number of days. Nothing else tells the app when a patient will run out.
The countdown starts when the order is marked delivered
A paid order waits in your queue until your team approves and ships it. When the carrier reports delivery, or your team marks the order delivered, the patient's treatment is set up in the app with their injections scheduled, and the supply clock starts.
From then on the reorder card on the patient's home screen shows the last treatment they bought and where they are in its supply: "About 16 days of supply left". The card is quiet for the first half of the supply. Once half is gone it switches to your brand color with "Time to reorder?" and the Reorder button in front. The screen they open to log a dose tells them.
The reminder goes out twice, and only twice
Every morning the portal checks every active patient who has not switched reorder reminders off. For each one it takes the most recent delivered order that carries a supply length, subtracts the days since delivery, and sends a reminder in two windows: when roughly ten days remain (eight to twelve), and within two days of the supply running out. A marker on the patient blocks a second send inside five days.
The reminder is a push notification where the patient has the native app, and an email for everyone, from your clinic's own Reorder reminder template. The default subject is "Time to reorder: About 10 days of supply left"; the body says reordering takes two taps and the order is reviewed before it ships. Neither names the medication, because an inbox preview is a lock screen. The template is yours to edit, and a patient can switch these reminders off.
Two taps: the same product, the same dose, the card on file
Tap Reorder and the app puts the same product and option in the cart and opens checkout. With a card saved, the payment confirms in the background with no card form. Tap Place order and it is done.
The app repeats the last option only when that is still right. If the product has been taken off the shop, the option has changed or is out of stock, or it falls outside the window around the patient's current dose (one step up or down), the app opens the product page instead. A patient your clinician moved from 2.5 mg to 5 mg is not quietly sold the old dose.
Auto-refill: the subscription option
The auto-refill switch and its controls live in the new patient app, which we turn on per clinic; the mechanics below run on the backend for any enrolled patient. Auto-refill takes the decision away from the patient. When it is on for a treatment, the portal charges the saved card and creates the next order on its own, on a cadence taken from the option's supply length. The charge is early on purpose, a week before the supply runs out (three days for supplies of three weeks or less), so the package arrives before the last dose.
Three days before each charge the patient gets a short check-in: how are you doing, any side effects, has anything changed, do you want to continue. If the answers are fine, the refill goes ahead. A reported side effect, a change in health, "worse", or a request for a different dose holds the refill instead of shipping it, and fires a provider-review event to HighLevel if it is connected. "Stop" pauses it. The patient can pause, resume, skip one delivery, cancel, or change the card at any time.
When a refill charges, the patient is told "Your refill is on its way", and the order lands in your queue already paid, marked "Auto-refill payment received".
What your team sees
Every reorder arrives in the Orders list like any other order: number, patient, status, payment badge, date, total. A paid order shows as Awaiting review. Your team approves it and marks it shipped with the tracking number; the carrier's scans move it to Delivered on their own. Each status change emails the patient and, with HighLevel connected, fires your workflows.
The At risk list is the backstop: it flags Reorder overdue for a patient whose last order's supply has run out, plus two weeks of grace, with no newer order.
The three places reorders leak
1. The option has no supply length
The most common leak, and silent. Without a supply length the reorder card says "Last ordered Oct 3" instead of counting down, and only turns loud a flat three weeks after the order. The morning reminder skips the patient entirely, because it only looks at delivered orders that carry a supply length. The at-risk flag falls back to a flat 45 days. Auto-refill defaults to every 30 days.
The fix is a catalog pass: every product, every option, supply length and injections in supply filled in. The starter catalog's drafts carry a supply length on every option but not the number of injections in the supply, so fill that in before switching them live.
2. The queue sits
The countdown and the reminder both key off the delivery date. An order that waits in Awaiting review for a week is a week the clock has not started, and the patient sees Confirmed with the progress bar stuck near the start, then texts the desk. Worse is an order that ships but is never marked delivered, usually because no tracking number was added. No treatment is set up, no injections are scheduled, and the next reminder never fires, because there is no delivered order to count from.
The fix is a habit. Someone owns the queue every morning. Every shipped order gets its tracking number so delivery is detected without a human. Anything handed over in person is marked delivered on the spot.
3. The card declines
On a manual reorder a decline is visible: the patient sees it at checkout and can use another card. The quiet failure is on auto-refill, where nobody is looking at a screen. A declined card does not cancel the subscription. It moves to payment failed, the patient gets a push and an email, "We couldn't process your refill", and the charge is retried after two days, then three, then five. After three failures it pauses. If the bank wants the patient to confirm the payment, the message says that instead. Updating the card on the refill clears the failure and re-arms the next attempt.
On the clinic's side: nothing on the first failure, because the patient has been told and the retry is scheduled. After that the at-risk list catches it, since a paused refill means no new paid order. On Growth and up the API lists refills by status, so failing refills can be pulled into a list and worked before the supply runs out.
What is left for the clinic
None of this needs a campaign. The supply length is set once, the delivery date is set by the carrier, the reminder and the retries run on their own, and the purchase is two taps. What remains is three habits: fill in the catalog, work the queue, watch the overdue list. The patient app page shows the reorder card itself.
This is the operational side of reorders as our app runs them today. Nothing above is medical advice, and no treatment outcome is implied.