We've released a patient SMS portal in order to:

When a patient is sent an SMS message from the Smart Inbox, they will receive a generic message with a link leading to a secure patient portal (accessed by verifying their date of birth).

The patient will then be able to view the full message sent by the GP Practice in the Patient Portal.

After sending an SMS from the Smart Inbox users will be able to see two messages:

These messages will also appear in the PDF download of the eConsult.

For users that save the eConsult into EMIS or SystmOne directly from the eConsult Smart Inbox, when you save SMS messages both the generic SMS message and the actual message displayed in the Patient Portal will be shown in the clinical system.

When a patient receives an SMS message from the Smart Inbox, they'll receive a generic notification message that reads:

"Important message from your GP practice, click the link to view"

When the patient presses on the link this will take them to their browser to access the Patient Portal. They will be asked to enter their date of birth as verification to see the full message (as shown below):

After the patient has entered their date of birth, they'll be able to view all SMS messages and emails that have been sent to them in relation to that eConsult (provided the message has been sent from the Smart Inbox).

The messages will be listed from oldest to newest, so the patient will view the most recent message first but can scroll up to see past messages all associated to that eConsult.

Please note that the date of birth will always be the patient's date of birth, that they entered on their eConsult. This is the same for proxy and paediatric eConsults. For more information on proxy access please see here.

When a patient is sent an email from the Smart Inbox this will be sent directly and not within the Patient Portal. However, emails sent through the Smart Inbox will still be displayed within the portal if they are also sent an SMS message.

Currently there is no change to the patient response template. For messages that have been sent with a response link, the patient will open the link from the portal and reply in the normal way. However, in future we do hope to add patient reply functionality to the portal.

At present attachments can still only be sent by email as the Patient Portal does not handle attachments. If an email with an attachment is sent, the email will still appear in the patient portal but it will not indicate that a file was attached. In the future we hope to build the ability for attachments to be delivered via the portal.

Patient replies will not be displayed in the portal. However in future we would like to show all the message exchanges and allow patients to reply directly through the portal.

If an SMS is sent to a patient via the New Message feature in the Smart Inbox, this message will be sent as a regular SMS message rather than via via the Patient Portal.

This is because the message is not associated with an eConsult and therefore we cannot create a date of birth verification to secure the portal. The character limit for New Message will remain at 1,000.

Messages will appear in the patient portal for 3 months. Patients will be informed of this in the portal and advised to save messages elsewhere if they would like to access the information sent to them by the practice long-term.

The security feature will lock the patient portal if the patient's date of birth is entered incorrectly 5 times. This is to protect patient messages from being fraudulently accessed. If a patient contacts the practice due to being locked out of the portal, please contact the support team via our live chat or at practice.support@econsult.health.

If you have any questions or you feel that this article could be improved, please feel free to give us some feedback by emailing us, pressing the emojis below or using the chat button on the bottom right-hand side of this page to speak to one of the eConsult team.