Recently launched

March 2024

Efficiently manage the identity of your patients

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Managing patients' identities across multiple systems is often a challenge. Across various systems, patients are assigned unique, portable identifiers to track them throughout these systems. External entities, including government agencies, may issue many identifiers, such as Patient Medical Record Numbers (MRNs) and Provider Numbers.

With Awell, you can now efficiently and effectively manage your patients' identities. With the introduction of identifier systems, we allow patients to have multiple identifiers (also called "business identifiers"). These identifiers can be leveraged when designing careflows, with our API and careflow triggers. For example, you can now retrieve patients and start careflows using the business identifier you have assigned rather than the Awell patient ID.

Identifiers can be assigned to patients via the Awell apps, the API, incoming webhook triggers, and shareable Hosted Pages links. Identifier values are forced to be unique within a given system within your organization (i.e. say goodbye to duplicate patient resources ).

Click here to learn more about patient identifiers and to get started.

Reduced cognitive load and (perception of) decreased waiting time in Hosted Pages

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We optimized the loading experiences in Hosted Pages, resulting in a smoother user experience. We eliminated all Awell lingo in the loading screens, such as sessions, activities, and authentication, and implemented loading skeletons. Leveraging loading skeletons creates the illusion that wait time is shorter. Moreover, users are encouraged to stay engaged by allowing them to predict where content will appear. The user's cognitive load is reduced, driving their attention to progress instead of waiting time.

Improve data quality by validating dates & numbers

You can now add validation rules for number and date question types in your forms. For numbers, you can add a minimum and maximum range, whereas for dates, you can specify whether the respondent can select all dates, only past dates, or only future dates. Applying validation to input fields can significantly enhance data quality and optimize your administrative and clinical workflows.

Extension marketplace updates

Added

• The first version of our Athenahealth extension has been launched.

• Textline is a customer engagement platform similar to Twilio, which allows you to engage with your users through transactional text messages.

✨ Improvements

• The Twilio extension has a new action allowing you to send text messages only during the daytime (between 9 AM and 5 PM). This ensures that all messages reach your respondents during reasonable daytime hours, enhancing the likelihood of timely and considerate communication (click here to learn more).

• The Awell workflow extension has a new action that allows updating baseline info.

February 2024

Secure and HIPAA-compliant fax with WestFax

It's hard to believe that faxing could be exciting in 2024, yet here we are! In some instances, fax remains a vital tool for exchanging information between care providers. With the WestFax extension, you can now send faxes securely while fully adhering to HIPAA regulations.

Interested in learning more more about WestFax? Get in touch with us and we'll provide all the information you need. Click here to learn more about the WestFax extension.

Trigger care flows with data and events from 3rd party systems

Care flows in Awell can be triggered in various ways, and the choice of trigger type depends on your use case. In Awell Studio, we've ensured that you can seamlessly explore the diverse trigger types available for your care flow, allowing you to browse and pick the trigger type that best suits your needs.

Moreover, you can now easily set up webhook-triggered care flows within Awell Studio without writing a single line of code! Webhook-triggered care flows are unique because they’re triggered by data and events in 3rd party systems. When you set up a care flow and select the “Incoming Webhooks” trigger type, you’ll get a webhook URL that’s generated by Awell. You’ll provide this URL to the service that will send data or events to Awell. Moreover, when setting up incoming webhooks, you also can pass data from the webhook payload into your care flow.

Interested in exploring webhook-triggered care flows or any other trigger types we offer? Have a look here for an overview of all our trigger types and when to use them, and here for more information about webhook-triggered care flows.

Support for text values in single- and multi-select questions

You can now use text values for your answer options in single- and multi-select questions. This allows you to collect data in a format that fits your needs. While numeric values remain a practical choice, especially for calculations, text values offer more detailed and descriptive options for answers.

To start using text values for your answer options, simply go to our form builder account and edit your single and multi-select questions. Within the question configuration, you'll find the option to choose your option value type. Please note that you can only change the value type of your options once. Should you need to switch back, a new question must be added to your form. This is done to maintain the integrity of your question data types and avoid breaking changes in your care flows.

Learn more about how to get started with text values for answer options.

January 2024

Always ready for patient visits: a convenient way for patients to complete pending activities on-site

You may be providing in-person care or welcoming patients for scheduled appointments. It's essential that patients have finished all pending activities in their care flow, whether in preparation for the care you're providing or their upcoming visit. However, we understand that patients can sometimes forget to complete these at-home activities. Nonetheless, it's important to guarantee that patients finish all their activities, ensuring they are thoroughly prepared for their visit. What better way to facilitate this than by having them do so during their on-site visit as a last resort?

This is why we've made it incredibly easy for you to help patients complete any outstanding activities in their care flows while they are on-site. Here’s how it works:

• When a patient arrives for their visit and you notice they haven't finished the required pre-visit activities...

• Simply click on the QR code button located at the top of your screen in Awell Care.

• Have the patient scan the QR code using their device, or use a tablet provided by your facility.

• The patient can now complete their pending activities while they wait.

And that's all ! You now possess all the necessary information to ensure a seamless and efficient visit for both you and your patient.

⏲️ Keep content relevant, your care flows running, and data quality high with Action Expiration

As a care provider, you are striving for maximum compliance and adherence to your care flows. However, aiming for 100% compliance is often an elusive target. Sometimes, patients may refuse, forget, or delay completing activities.

In such cases, filling out the previous year's survey is not only redundant but can also compromise data quality and confuse the patient.

With Action Expiration, you can set an expiration time for an action after a specified period of inactivity. Once the expiration time is reached, the action is marked as expired, indicating it is no longer active or pending. Action Expiration is now available on two action types: forms and messages.

• Forms: after expiry, the care flow will skip the form action. This ensures that the recipient no longer has to complete the outdated form, allowing the care flow to move on. Since forms are blocking actions in care flows (i.e., the next action or step is triggered only after the form is completed or expires), Action Expiration can effectively prevent your care flows from being stuck.

• Messages: after expiry, the care flow will skip the message action. This ensures that the recipient no longer has to read the outdated message.

Action Expiration allows you to:

1. Keep content relevant:
   Have full control over how long messages and forms are active for recipients. Expired actions will no longer be visible to recipients (e.g., in Awell Hosted Pages), ensuring only relevant content is presented.

2. Keep your care flows running:
   Since forms are blocking actions, Action Expiration facilitates uninterrupted progression in care flows by marking forms as expired, thereby resuming subsequent actions.

3. Keep data quality high:
   Ensure that data collection through forms occurs within the appropriate time frame.

Want to learn more about Action Expiration or get started? Click here!

Seamless login with SSO, improved data quality with sliders, select questions with dynamically-loaded choices, and more!

Are your users exhausted from having to recall another set of login details to sign in to Awell? Then the addition of Single Sign-On (SSO) capabilities into the Awell platform will sound like sweet lullabies.

With SSO enabled, your users can access Awell’s apps using their existing set of credentials as recorded in your identity platform. It not only simplifies the end-user experience by removing the need to remember and manage yet another password, but it also streamlines user management across systems for your tech teams.

We offer SSO enabled by the OAuth/OIDC protocol, which is compatible with widely used email providers such as Google and Microsoft. However, recognizing that not all SSO is OAuth, we also accommodate Enterprise Connections with "workforce Identity Providers." These are bespoke Identity Provider instances tailored to your organization, acting as a central repository for employee identity information and the applications they can access.

Want to learn more about SSO, how to get started, and the identity providers we support? Have a look at our Developer Hub.

The slider question in all our apps has been updated, significantly improving the quality of the data collected. Previously, sliders automatically recorded an answer - by default the minimum answer - even if the respondent did not interact with the slider. This made it impossible to differentiate between an unanswered slider (for optional sliders) and a minimum answer selection made deliberately (for both optional and required sliders). Furthermore, the slider is a digital adaptation of the widely used paper-based Visual Analogue Scale (VAS). To ensure validity, the slider must start without a preset position for the thumb, as this could potentially influence the respondent's answer.

With the recent update, users must actively interact with the slider to select an answer. This change eliminates the default thumb position, enhancing the validity of the data. For optional slider questions, this update allows for differentiation between an intentional selection of the minimum answer and a slider left unanswered.

Would you like to test the updated slider component? Click here!

The single-select question type is a popular question type in our form builder, traditionally requiring a predefined set of choices. But what if your choices need to be more flexible, are changing over time, or are not known at the time you are building the form?

With our new “Advanced data collection” extension, you can now dynamically load choices directly from a remote source, such as an API. This not only offers greater flexibility, like loading an extensive list of many choices but also keeps your data collection process efficient and up-to-date.

Small fixes, big improvements

Added

• OPERATE | AWELL CARE: you can now prefill forms with responses from one of the previously submitted forms

• design | scores:

  • Keratoconus Outcomes Research Questionnaire (KORQ)

  • Modified Lysolm Knee Score (MLKS)

  • Acromegaly Quality of Life Questionnaire (AcroQoL)

✨ Improvements

• OPERATE | ORCHESTRATION: performance optimization that was likely behind some intermittent failures in the orchestration API in US & EU environments

🛠️ Fixes

• OPERATE | AWELL CARE: misc fixes related to filters in the working list

November 2023

Manage care flows as code using SCM systems

Source Control allows you to sync your care flows as code to remote Source Control Management (SCM) providers, such as GitHub and Gitlab.

You can now collaborate seamlessly across clinical ops and engineering teams, gain visibility into changes between published care flow versions, update them promptly, and publish with confidence.

View how to configure Source Control here.

Customize your care flow URL with your (sub)domain

Add another layer of branding into the Hosted Page URL by replacing the default goto.awell.health with your organization domain or subdomain. Your stakeholders are able to view the URL when it’s linked in an email for example, or upon clicking a button and opening the page in the browser, leading to stronger brand recognition and a consistent identity across different touch points.

Find out how to do so here.

Set default country code on a phone number input for better user experience

By picking a default phone country code or limiting the country code options in the dropdown, it saves your stakeholders (eg. patients) a click when inputting their phone numbers in a form.

Here is how you do it.

What’s next?

• We’re working on showing visual differences highlighting the changes between different care flow versions in Awell Studio. This will aid the comparison and identification of specific changes through better visualization.

Roll back to a previously published care flow

You now have the ability to save and set any version of your care flow ‘live’. Made a change that you need to bring back? No problem. Want to briefly enroll a patient in a different version of a care flow? Feel free! Simply set a version of a care flow as live and all patients will be directed to that version of a care flow. Or, simply publish a working and tested version of a care flow with the intention of setting it as live in the future.

This flexibility and control to toggle between different care flow versions for different purposes ensures that your stakeholders are always engaging with the correct version. You can now design, publish, and update your care flows with confidence.

We’ll continue to build on it over the next few weeks so please provide us feedback (Slack is the perfect place)!

Note: Reverting back to a previous version will also revert care flow settings such as reminders, webhooks, constants, extensions, and API call retry settings back to that version.

Start your care flows with the click of a button

You can now easily generate a unique link for a care flow in Awell Studio, share it on your website or portal, which upon clicking, instantly starts an Awell Hosted Page session. No engineering resources required - eliminating the need for any coding to start with Hosted Pages.

Your stakeholders can engage with care flow activities such as completing a health questionnaire, going through onboarding, and raising health concerns immediately after clicking the link. Currently, this feature only works for care flows involving anonymous patients or stakeholders like your care team. We are working to allow you to reconcile or merge care flows started through the link with existing patient profiles.

Generating a care flow link is also perfect for quickly testing patient-centric flows. Plus, you can convert these links into QR codes for even easier access.

Furthermore, it is possible to configure the link in different languages, with cancel/success URLs (to better redirect users who have completed all their activities or have aborted their sessions), and customizable slugs (eg. https://goto.awell.health/onboarding) – all without hassle. Our next step is to allow for you to use your own domain names in the link eg. https://onboarding.yourcompany.com

Small fixes, big improvements

Added

• DESIGN | Change management Change management is now available.

• design | scores: The Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) score and questionnaire was added

• BUILD | EXTENSIONS The Calendly extension now includes a is_rescheduled_event datapoint to help better understand whether or not an appointment is new or a from a previously cancelled appointment.

🗑️ Removed

• build | extensions: event.rescheduled webhook was removed from the Calendly extension. We have worked with impacted customers to ensure a migration to the event.scheduled webhook

✨ Improvements

• design | scores: The following questionnaires are now available in French: Oxford Hip Score, HOOS, KOOS and SF-12

🛠️ Fixes

• build | extensions: Improved validation of Sendbird update custom fields action

• build | extensions: Unresolved webhooks no longer inadvertently trigger new care flows

• build | extensions: Action to create a conversation in Healthie now uses additional deprecated fields that Healthie still relies on internally for updating conversations

• design | STUDIO When refreshing an extension, data points are updated to reflect changes in type as well (e.g. data point changes from string type to a number type)

• design | STUDIO Fix for data variables not persisting when used in inputs

• design | STUDIO OPERATE | DATA POINTS Fix for calculation data point values not appearing (e.g. in API call bodies or messages) as expected when used as data variables

• design | STUDIO OPERATE | DATA POINTS Date handling logic improved, including a fix for ISO datestrings with 6 or more digits of microsecond precision

• OPERATE | CARE Improved the performance of the working list

What’s next?

• We’re working to allow the syncing of your GitHub (or any other Git-supported tool) repository with changes in your care flows. This provides full visibility and ensures that each update is traceable and reversible as commits in your code repository.

Transparency and insights for care flows with Audit Logs

In the past few weeks, we've made significant enhancements to our Orchestration platform, focusing on increasing both robustness and transparency. The introduction of Audit Logs offers an invaluable resource for understanding the intricacies of your care flow activities. These logs acts as detailed and comprehensible breadcrumbs providing a clear trail of all activities within your care flows and give insights into the precise moments and reasons behind the activation of tracks, steps, actions, and more.

In addition to navigating through a straightforward table in Awell Care to review Audit Logs, you can engage with AvaGPT to pose questions in everyday language. AvaGPT, equipped with the entirety of the audit logs in its framework, leverages this context to assist you with precise responses. Its strength lies in its ability to synthesize and link disparate pieces of information, delivering in-depth answers to multifaceted queries that may not be immediately apparent from a simple table view. The audit logs can also be retrieved via the API.

Added

• design | scores: new score calculations added: Modified Fatigue Impact Scale (MFIS), Bladder Control Scale (BLCS), Bowel Control Scale (BWCS), and Pain Disability Index (PDI)

• build | extensions:

  • Calendly extension added that allows to start a care flow based on these events: event.created,event.canceled, event.rescheduled

  • Infobip extension added to the Marketplace

✨ Improvements

• operate | awell hosted pages: several improvements to make fetching the next activity more reliable and resilient, additional error monitoring was added too

🛠️ Fixes

• design | validation: fixed an error where care flow validation errors weren’t displayed to the user

• operate | orchesration: fix to properly handle description questions in form submission

October 2023

Extensions, extensions everywhere!

In this week’s update, we have lots of good stuff around Awell Extensions. On top of that, we drastically improved the loading times between activities in Awell Hosted Pages. That and more .

Added

• build | extensions:

  • Zendesk: actions to create and complete tasks

  • Iterable: actions to send emails and track events

✨ Improvements

• build | extensions:

  • Elation: misc. updates to already existing actions and new actions added. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwYJ9k9qA3k&t=18s&ab_channel=Awell and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RrgxLytKU4&t=218s&ab_channel=Awell.

  • Healthie: actions added to update a patient’s quick note, create a metric entry, and retrieve a metric entry

  • Cloudinary: action added to upload a single file which allows storing the uploaded file URL in a data point

• operate | awell hosted pages: the speed at which activities are retrieved and the session is ended has been drastically increased (i.e. loading times are much faster)

• operate | orchesration: misc. improvements to make the track and step activation process more resilient and idempotent

🛠️ Fixes

• operate | awell hosted pages: fix an edge case where the activities loaded in Awell Hosted Pages were in the incorrect order.

Unified Data Variables: Road To Constants And Variables Everywhere!

We are rebranding constants and dynamic variables to data variables and making sure both types of data variables can be used anywhere in Awell Studio. Constants are particularly handy when you want to store a static value and use that in multiple places in your care flows. Dynamic variables allow you to store, transform, and use data that is captured in your care flow. Though they are different in the type of information they store, they both help you to pass data in and out of Awell.

Constants and dynamic variables already existed in Awell but you were limited in where you were able to use them. With this release, we are starting the journey to make data variables available everywhere. From today, you can use both types of data variables in the Endpoint & Headers fields of our API call actions. Over the course of Q4, we will be rolling out unified data variables to more places in the product. We are aiming to have a unified experience on how our users work with data in Awell.

Added

• build | api: you can now programatically schedule a track in a patient care flow for a date in the future. Scheduled tracks can also be unscheduled. This new feature in our API allows you to directly tell our system what the right timing to start a track is.

✨ Improvements

• operate | orchesstration: various improvements and safeguards to protect orchestration against infinite loops which could bring down the system

• build | api: the form.submitted webhook now returns more information about the form’s design like question keys and titles (read the docs)

September 2023

Infinite loop control, sharing links to activities, and more

Added

• design | workflow: the patient ID can now be used as a data point in a care flow

• operate | orchestration: Infinite Loop control - we added preventive measures to reduce the impact of infinite loops in our system

• operate | care management: you can now navigate directly to an activity from the working list (and share it as a link!)

✨ Improvements

• design | workflow: improved truncation logic of dropdown labels so you can see more of a data point’s name

• build | extensions: webhook endpoints URL are now deterministic (instead of a random id, there is now a logic to the name, which makes it easy to reconstruct reliably)

• operate | care management: sorting now works correctly on a number of tables (e.g. working list can be sorted by date!)

🛠️ Fixes

• design | workflow: a specific track activation configuration involving ad-hoc tracks no longer breaks your track list in Studio

• design | workflow: an extension action configuration panel can now have multiple JSON inputs without bugging out

• build | extensions: extension webhooks and data points are now correctly exported and imported when promoting care flows

• operate | orchestration: stopping a care flow now correctly generates the activity for it, preventing the care flow feed from permanently erroring into oblivion due to a GraphQL error

• operate | orchestration: we no longer allow forms to be submitted without answers to required questions

Historical updates:

How we compose our page

Guiding principles

• Updates are for humans, not machines.

• Not every change in the code needs an entry in the page, we highlight what we believe is most impactful for our users.

• Introducing breaking changes is not done. In the rare case of a breaking change, a deprecation and removal process will be followed which is separate from our regular release updates.

• We group release updates by date and updates can be aggregated.

• The date of the release update doesn’t necessarily correlate with the date of the actual release. We believe that creating release updates and documentation is a low-risk initiative, that documentation is supportive instead of required, and we want to have as few gates as possible to ship value to our customers. Therefore, we don’t mind a bit of slack in release updates. However, we try to communicate updates within a week of the release.

• The latest product update comes first.

• Release notes are grouped by the type of change and

Types of changes

• ⚡ Added for new features.

• ✨ Improvements for changes in existing functionality.

• ⚠️ Deprecated for soon-to-be removed features.

• 🗑️ Removed for now removed features.

• 🛠️ Fixed for any bug fixes.

• 🔑 Security in case of vulnerabilities.

CareOps stages

• 🎛️ Manage

• Design

• Validate

• Build

• Operate

• Measure

• Improve

Repositories

Are you in need of more detailed release updates for some of our public repositories? You can always have a look on Github: