Common Chat Center Questions

• Can you add patients without prescribing them to a CareSignal program?
• • Through the Chat Center add patient drawer ("New Chat" --> "Add") you can add patients without prescribing them programs.
  • If you do make use of this, one thing to note is that you'll want to associate these patients with a specific tag so that they can then be surfaced in a patient view. A drawback for this is that the patients will have to be added one by one.

• If patients try to call the number they receive a text from is there a way to forward it so it goes to care managers work phone? Or even the provider contact number?
  • There is not currently a way to do this and it would be difficult to do something like this since a patient can be in multiple programs with potentially different provider contacts.

• We noticed that when we use secure messaging it only sends one notification with the original message to the patients phone. Any response we give after the initial outreach won’t send a notification to the patient. Is this standard or is it something we are able to change?
  • This is how the flow is supposed to work:
    • When a patient is first sent a secure chat message, the system will text them the following: Your care team has sent you a secure message, view it at: {url}
    • Once the patient has opened the chat in their browser, messages back and forth will be visible there.
    • If the patient closes the chat and a new secure message gets sent out from the care team, the system follows these rules:
      • If the system hasn't pinged the patient before OR 30+ minutes have passed since the last ping, the patient will receive the same text above.
  • For security purposes, secure chat links expire. Patients can text the word secure to the chat phone number to have a new URL sent to them (if they want to communicate proactively). 

• Are there any links that would cause the message not to send? For example, I have a lot of content saved in a google drive and was aiming to share links to those files for patients. In the message I was trying to send, I had several google drive shareable links included
  
  • In my experience, having a link at all in the text message will not outright prevent it from being sent, but I think carriers may filter texts as spam sometimes if it includes a link. It is hard to say at the moment how including the google drive links would impact the texts. I would imagine if the message is sent successfully, and the patient is able to respond if they could open the link, then that could be a good initial litmus test for using links in the chat center!
    
  • If the link is very long, then the text may get split up if it is greater than 160 characters. The majority of modern phones are able to "re-join" the split texts back into one text. However, it is good practice when sending text messages to follow the 160 character limit if possible (this is not a hard-and-fast rule)!

• Is there any formatting of the message that would cause it not to send? Certain characters or text structuring? For example, can I use dashes (-) or create separate paragraphs via shift+enter?
  
  • There is not any special formatting that would prevent the text from being sent. Dashes are perfectly fine, and separate paragraphs (created by return or shift+enter) use what we call a newline character (displayed as \n) but that is perfectly fine to use as well. Most modern phones will recognize that and create the newline accordingly.