Sending drip SMS via Twilio in a flow

This is my first post; I'm a non-developer trying hard to learn how to use Twilio.

I've got my head around the basics of Twilio Studio including the limited API but can't figure out how to accomplish the following if I could get some help, please.

Not sure if it matters but this is just a POC; I recently had surgery and they sent me an email survey after a month asking me how I felt weeks ago which I thought was pretty pointless. Now, as a learning method, I'm trying to figure out if and how this could work via SMS for a better customer experience.

The patient is sent a text message at intervals (the night of surgery, then 7, 14 and 21 days after) asking them to rate their pain by responding with a number from 1 to 10.

My attempt...

So far I've managed to build the first message, where the patient's surgery date, first name and cell phone number are stored in Google Sheets. A webhook is sent to Twilio Studio to send a message at 6pm on the night of the surgery, courtesy of Pabbly.

I'm aware that Twilio doesn't have a native delay feature, but I stumbled upon the code below, but I'm not sure if this could be extended to 1 week, and if even possible, if there's a better way to achieve this?

exports.handler = function(context, event, callback) {
    setTimeout(function() {
        callback();
    }, 2000);
};

I don't really want to wait to find out and think I read somewhere about limits on this delay feature. I've been working on this exact code for a quick pause on replies to reduce the automated feel of ridiculously fast replies (learned from a Twilio use case example).

The solution really needs to follow a flow, so it doesn't risk having pain rates associated with the wrong time period. It also needs to be sent from the same number, so multiple API calls won't work (as far as I know), nor will keywords, since patient responses are not unique.

Thanks, Brendan

It seems like you're interested in sending out scheduled messages and at certain intervals. You could try out a feature called Message Scheduling.

Here's an example:

client.messages
      .create({
         messagingServiceSid: 'MGXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX',
         body: 'This is a scheduled message',
         sendAt: new Date(Date.UTC(2021, 10, 30, 20, 36, 27)),
         scheduleType: 'fixed',
         to: '+15558675310'
       })
      .then(message => console.log(message.sid));

With Message Scheduling, you can schedule a message more than 15 minutes ahead to fewer than 7 days in advance.

Basically you add a sendAt parameter with a time that you want to send a message. You can perform datetime operations so you can schedule a message 7 days after their surgery (by adding 7 days to the time of their surgery).

Since you're using Twilio Studio, I'd recommend reading this blog post I wrote about How to Schedule a Message in Studio. It's written in Python but the same principle applies to other languages.