Patchs 1.95 Release (25th July 2024)

Dan Sprague
Dan Sprague
  • Updated

The 1.95 New Features Webinar will take place on 15th August 2024 from 12.00pm - 12.45pm. You can register here.

Alternatively, the replay will be made available on this page shortly after.

Below are details of this month's:

New Features

Patchs AI Care Navigator

An evolution of Patchs AI, the AI Care Navigator gives your practice more control over the way that patient requests are processed. 

By bringing together the capabilities of the existing five Patchs AI modules, it means that Patchs AI is now more integrated, more comprehensive, and more powerful. It can - simply put - do more things.

With the AI Care Navigator, practices will now be able to set up tailored actions based on a combination of AI flags and labels - making the automated elements of your triage processes more intelligent.

For example, you might instruct the Care Navigator to:

  • Book a patient identified as having routine knee pain an appointment with your first contact, in-person physio.
  • Signpost a patient identified as displaying urgent mental health symptoms to your local crisis team.
  • Direct a patient who is under-18 and who has an ear infection to their local pharmacist

These abilities will be rolled out on a staggered basis. Initial actions will include the ability to: send a message to a patient, and to send a questionnaire to a patient. The ability to send a self-book link to a patient will be coming soon.

The AI Care Navigator will continue to evolve, so in future you can expect to be able to, for example, automatically assign certain request types to specific clinicians.

As part of this release, practices who currently have Topic AI Questions switched on will be able to use the AI Care Navigator.

Because the AI Care Navigator is able to do everything that Topic AI Questions can do - and more - you will no longer see Topic AI Questions as one of your available features. Everything you previously did using Topic AI Questions, you will now manage via the AI Care Navigator.

Please refer to this page for more information.

Telephone Assistant: now easier to request

Want to end the 8am rush at your practice? Don't yet have Telephone Assistant enabled? You can now easily request Patchs Telephone Assistant for your practice from your Feature Settings page: simply click on the blue button to notify our Sales team of your interest:

New Questionnaires

We have added two new clinical questionnaires to the existing bank of questionnaires available on Patchs:

  • Urinary Tract Infection (UTI) - Male
  • Urinary Tract Infection (UTI) - Female
  • Periods - Heavy (Menorrhagia)

These questionnaires will be mapped to topics. This means that if your practice has Topic AI Questions switched on, they will be triggered for requests identified as containing these complaints.

New mapping for Topic AI

Topic AI has been updated. Now, when the following topics are identified in a patient's request, these questionnaires will be sent to them:

  • Medication review → Medication review questionnaire
  • Alcohol → AUDIT
  • COPD → COPD review
  • COCP → COCP review
  • HRT → HRT review
  • POP → POP review

Please refer to the table on this page for a full list of Topic AI mappings.

Features newly out of pilot

The following features were previously only available to our Early Adopter ('pilot') practices. They are now on general release:

New Features: Early Adopters 

Note: Early Adopters receive access to new Patchs features before they go on general release. You can request to have your practice added to our list of Early Adopters by email

Automatically save appointment reminders & messages to clinical system

When a patient has been sent an appointment reminder or a post-appointment message, this feature will now save this information into the clinical system. 

Via a new user interface, it will also allow you to more easily audit which messages have and haven't been sent, and which have been saved to the clinical system.

You can find more information about this feature here.

Outgoing SMS messaging: shortened tokenised URLs

When sending messages to patients, practices will now be able to send unique, time-limited shortened tokenised URLs. By reducing the number of SMS segments a message takes up, it reduces SMS costs.

The new, shortened URLs will be visible in: messages to non-digital patients, bulk messages, appointment-booking messages, post-appointment messages, and invitations to video consultations.

Bug Fixes

Questionnaires: staff instructions displayed for completed questionnaires

Staff users can now see associated staff instructions for questionnaires that have been sent to patients once completed by the patient, not just at the point of sending.

Outgoing emails: sending retrys

If a verification email sent to a patient has bounced (when patients are first registering for Patchs), Patchs will now try to send the email again a couple of times, instead of giving up instantly. 

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