Whats New - Release April 2024
This mini release is focused on one feature which will enable the system to send notifications to patients by email alone instead of both SMS & email.
Why have we implemented this feature?
As we have grown it has become clear that the technical limits of SMS technology do not support the level of reliability we require when notifying patients about their orders. The typical failure rate for any SMS notification system is 1-2% due to factors largely beyond our control such as Telephone network capacity at peak times, phone operator spam filters and settings on individual phone handsets.
Email transmission is more reliable and also supports enhanced features such as your pharmacy logo/branding and include a scannable version of the collection pin number. The cost of transmitting SMS has also increased to circa 3p per message and in order to manage these costs we need to create the ability for the system to use email notifications as the primary method of notification, with SMS used as a backup method.
Activating this setting does not mean that SMS will not be sent.
It means that, if we have an email address for a patient, we will first try to send the notification to that email address. If that attempt fails, the system will automatically cascade the notification to an SMS. This will result in a mixture of different notification methods being used with the ultimate goal of ensuring the patient has received a notification one way or the other.
The notification status column of the MedPoint portal has been updated to make clear how the notification was sent for a given order.
Note: These changes affect all users, regardless of whether the "email only" setting is turned on.
- The speech bubble icon indicates the notification was sent by SMS
- The envelope icon indicates the notification was sent by email.
See example below. Hovering over these icons with the cursor will confirm this via a pop-up tooltip. The same information is displayed on the order details screen under "Notification Status"
There are 4 possible statuses for both Email and SMS notifications, so there are 16
possible combinations which are outlined in the below table. Where both and SMS and an email have been delivered successfully, the SMS icon takes precedence and is the only one displayed.
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