It is now possible for teams to automatically receive secure messages as a team rather than as individuals. This functionality is the most requested improvement to PKB’s secure messaging – the feature patients most ask to use with professionals. The lack of team messaging prevents some teams from consulting with patients online. This improvement will give more patients, more access to teams online.

Why is this important?

This new functionality allows teams to respond quickly to patients and for clinicians to share their workloads. It also reduces the likelihood of a message going unnoticed or not being responded to in a timely manner. For example, if a clinician is on annual leave, other members of the team can also reply in their absence as participants of that discussion. 

Team-based messaging prevents the previous workaround where some customers have created shared logins. Shared logins reduce the security of the system, as the more people using the same credentials increases the likelihood of information being shared with people who do not have a valid reason to access PKB. Using shared logins also reduces the accuracy of audit information, as the system only knows that the account contains viewed or changed information within the record, not which clinician was actually using the shared account. 

How to set this up

For teams who have the automatic CC feature enabled, all contactable members of that team now display together in the recipient drop-down and members of that team can no longer be selected individually. This applies when creating a new message or adding participants to an existing message thread. 

Where a clinician is already part of a message thread when their team enable automatic CC, the clinician will remain as a participant of the message thread. Other members of the team will have to be manually added via the ‘Add contacts’ page. However, if a clinician is not marked as ‘Contactable by messages’, they will not be shown in the recipient drop-down list with the rest of their team and will not be added as a participant in the message thread where their team is selected. 

Clinicians within automatic CC teams can still leave any discussions they choose. Leaving a discussion will only remove them but other team members will remain as participants.

This feature was released on production 5th December 2019. To set up this feature in your organisation, please contact your customer success team member.