An integral part of an organization's patient engagement strategy is the ability to provide patients with the ability to communicate with their providers. This bi-directional communication allows patients to initiate conversations with their care team; this could include asking questions about their medical health or upcoming appointment, or asking non-medical questions.  Organizations may use the messaging capabilities of Personal Community to initiate conversations with their patients, provide them additional information or education about their care, or notify patients when there are new events in a patients medical care.

Personal Community supports two workflows for communicating with patients. This includes:

• Secure Messages - bi-directional communication between patients and providers within the Personal Community application. 
• Direct Notifications - automatic, workflow based notifications intended to inform a patient about upcoming events, or direct them to Personal Community to complete an action.

Secure Messaging allows patients and their providers to securely communicate with each other.  These messaging activities include:

• Messages sent by members to providers:

  • Asking general, medical, and billing questions.

  • Replying to messages from providers.

• Messages sent by providers to members:

  • Sending provider-initiated messages to members.

  • Replying to messages from members.

• Automated message creation and delivery from trusted external systems:
  • Sending messages automatically when certain events occur in an external system, such as receipt of new health records in the Unified Care Record.
  • Attaching documentation and education to messages.
  • Using   message templates   to:
    • Supply pre-written content for messages.
    • Automatically direct messages that use the template to either the patient’s or the proxy’s inbox.
  • Receiving updates when a patient reads messages and attachments, if desired.

Patients may use the Messaging section of Personal Community to initiate or reply to messages in their inbox. The mechanism that governs how each message passes to and from each clinical group is known as a  message flow . When a patient creates and sends a new message, that message enters the appropriate message flow. At that point, Personal Community determines if the message goes to the Workbench or to an external messaging system via a custom   delivery interface .

When a message is sent to the Workbench, Personal Community creates a task within the Workbench for a given workflow group to manage. Only Workbench users who are associated with this workflow group can claim this task and respond to the patient. 

For more information about workflow groups and task management, refer to the HealthShare Personal Community Workflows, Agents, and Tasks Function Guide.

Providers, care team members, and administrators use the Personal Community Workbench to initiate or respond to messages with patients.

The Workbench can be used to:

• Send new messages to patients from Messages section. 

• Reply to patient initiated messages by claiming and responding to the associated Workbench task.

Messages may also be automatically generated and sent from a triggering event within the external system. For these messages, the external system has the opportunity to receive updates on the read status of messages and any attachments that have been sent to patients. This provides the system that sends the message an accurate account of whether or not a patient is reading the materials sent to them.

When implementing messaging for Personal Community, you must make decisions regarding the following issues:

Supported Messaging Activities

You must select which messaging activities to support. There are multiple aspects to this decision:

Messages   from patients to   providers, and:

• Whether or not to enable general, medical, and billing questions, or a combination of all of them.

• Whether or not to allow patients to reply to messages from their providers.

• Whether and how to filter the list of providers available for messaging by patients.

• Whether or not to allow patients initiated messaging.

Messages   from   providers   to patients , and:

• Whether to use pre-written content, available with the use of message templates.

• Whether to allow messages sent on behalf of clinical groups without a provider specified. 

• Whether to enable provider messaging.
• Whether or not to allow patients to reply to provider messages.

Additional considerations for messages   from   providers   to patients , via an external system:

• Whether to support message file attachments.

• Whether to direct messages based on message templates to the patient's inbox automatically.

• Which messages, if any, will be sent automatically if certain events occur.

• Whether or not the message read status needs to be monitored.

Supported Message Routes for Patient Initiated Messages

You must determine which mechanism(s) for messaging you will support:

• Messaging with the Workbench   — Messages are routed solely between the Personal Community public application and the Workbench. 

• Messaging with an external system   — Messages are routed between Personal Community and external systems. 

Notifications

• Whether to create and send notifications based on workflows within the Unified Care Record or external system.
• Whether or not to send notifications to patients when certain events occur within the Unified Care Record or external system.
• Whether or not to send notifications to a patient's proxy when certain events occur within the Unified Care Record or external system.