Drafting replies and reminders for patients

Draft the reply to a patient's message, the plain-language version of a discharge instruction, or the appointment reminder — and send none of it until it has been approved — anything clinical by the treating practitioner personally, administrative wording by a named clinic approver.

Effort
Days of work
Skill level
Comfortable with software
Organisation size
Small business
Value
Time saved, Quality

Tools named for this

  • A drafting model given the patient's message and the clinic's own instruction sheets
  • A registered SMS or voice channel for anything sent by telecom
  • The treating practitioner as approver for any clinical content, a named clinic approver for administrative wording only

What to check before you ship it in India

  • The Telemedicine Practice Guidelines state that technology platforms based on artificial intelligence or machine learning are not allowed to counsel patients or prescribe; such tools may assist a practitioner's evaluation, but the counselling or prescription has to be delivered by the practitioner directly.
  • Appointment reminders sent as SMS or voice calls sit under the TCCCPR 2018, where the sender registers a header and a content template in advance and only the template's variable portion changes. A message freshly composed for each patient does not sit inside a registered template.
  • The message and the condition it refers to are the patient's personal data. Where you rely on consent, s.6(1) of the DPDP Act requires it to be free, specific, informed and limited to the data the stated purpose actually needs — consent for treatment is not consent to be messaged about anything else.

Sources

Every claim on this page traces to one of these, on the date it was read.