Intro to Notifications

Tendo and customer healthcare organizations send a variety of messages to patients for different purposes. Some of these are related to patients' health, and others are operational, such as billing and tech support.

In the Notification section of Tools, healthcare organization users can create Notification Templates that define the content of outgoing email, SMS, push, and in-app notifications. These can be sent to patients as part of appointment workflows, outreach campaigns, or for other purposes such as surveys.

Notification Templates and Workflows

Notifications are created in notification templates and then sent to patients as part of standardized workflows that are created in the Workflows section of Tools.

In the Patient Care Journey app, patients can set preferences for categories of messages they want to receive and the channels via which they want to receive messages.

Messages are sent to patients in two ways:

Patients can click on Call to Action buttons in email messages to go into the Patient Care Journey app and complete actions related to their healthcare. This type of message fall into two categories:

• Transactional - These messages notify patients of actions that they need to perform as part of their care journey. These typically include pre-appointment tasks such as confirming an appointment, filling out forms, and checking in, and post-appointment tasks such as scheduling referrals and labs, viewing lab results, picking up prescriptions, and viewing providers' instructions.
• Outreach - These messages are sent to patients as part of outreach campaigns for different purposes. Examples are campaigns to encourage patients to schedule annual wellness visits or to sign up for Tendo.

For both of these types of messages, communication on the patient side is generally limited to taking action on Calls to Action in messages.

In addition to the above notifications, patients and providers can exchange messages about patients' specific healthcare concerns, billing, scheduling, and support questions, and prescription refills. These messages are not part of the Notifications feature, but are handled as part of Tendo’s separate Communications system, which enables patients to send messages to providers through the Messages section of the Patient Care Journey app. Providers and their teams can reply in the Tendo Provider app.

Notifications help patients manage their health and healthcare goals by alerting them to schedule medical visits and screenings, assisting them in managing complex medical regimens, and serving as a liaison between them and their healthcare system. Notifications inform patients of test results and chronic care or preventive services, and help them manage their medications.

They are an efficient way for providers and their staff members to communicate with patients about their care every step of the care journey. Notifications can be automated to help streamline administrative chores. Outreach campaigns sent in bulk to segments of patients cut down on clinical staffs' administrative load while keeping track of at-risk patients who need timely care.

The patient user experience with notifications is complex and pervades every stage of a patient’s care journey. It is informed by:

• The categories of messages set up by Tendo and the customer healthcare organization.
• The patient’s notification preferences in the Patient Care Journey app.
• Message templates created for specific categories of messages at various stages of the patient’s care journey, and the workflow sequences in which they are sent out.
• Outreach campaigns in which a patient is part of a targeted segment of patients who receive notifications asking them to take an action such as scheduling an annual wellness visit.

Choose an Existing Template

A notification template should include notifications for each channel that you want to send notifications via - email, SMS, push notifications, and/or in-app. To make it easier to create the content for each channel, choose Insert > Insert template and select an appropriate template, then tweak the content to make it specific to the purpose of your message.

Calls to Action

Many notification template emails have calls to action that are linked to sections in the Patient Care Journey app where patients can see more details and take action. For example, if you ask a patient in your message to schedule an appointment, include a linked Call to Action button in the email such as Schedule or Schedule Appointment. When they click on the Call to Action, they will be taken to the Patient Care Journey app’s appointment scheduling flow.

Call to Action links will expire after 7 days so you need to include a Refresh token so that users can click on the Call to Action after expiration.

To configure the Call to Action button or link, select Insert > Link and set the link to the appropriate token.

NOTE: For guest user appointment booking, an extra workflow step configured in Workflow is required to make this link work.

Outreach Campaigns Category

For outreach campaigns, select the category Proactive Messaging for your notification template if the audiences is non-Tendo users.