Patient Messages going to Clinic In-Basket Pools

Problem: Some patient communications appear to be inappropriately copied to clinic messaging pools when the patient and/or physician assumed that the exchange was exclusive to provider and patient.

Context: Some physicians already take advantage of Connect Care secure messaging to communicate with their patients. When patients use MyAHS Connect (patient portal), they are able to report outcomes and seek guidance from their clinician between visits; helpful in chronic disease management. Although many interactions may be okay for copying to a clinic messaging pool, where support staff can screen messages for urgent issues and ensure timely connections with the right providers, the physician and/or physician may want to keep the communication loop closed.

Solution: Clinic-level incoming messaging pools are important for ensuring that patient communications are appropriately screened, triaged and directed to the right provider. Previously, the "Send patient reply to me" checkbox, appearing on all message composition screens for physician-to-patient communications, was not selected by default. Clinicians may not have noticed and may not have appreciated that the patient reply would copy to a clinic message pool. As of this week, this option is now selected by default.