Alerting just got better!

It's been a while since I last blogged about alerts on Patient Opinion. Oh gosh, where does the time go?

So it is about time to start talking about some new ways we can alert (or perhaps just "nudge") you about things that might be important to you.

Let's start from some concerns we often hear from our subscribers.

We're worried we might miss responding to a post

Organisations that aim to respond to all posts sometimes worry that one will get missed. Sometimes people tell us they'd like to involve more staff in responding, but "how do we make sure we respond to posts in a timely way, when more people are involved?"

We have an alert for that! You can easily create it on your saved alerts page, and it looks like this:

This alert will nudge you if, three days after we published a post, nobody in your subscription has responded. Of course, you can change the time allowed before we alert you, and you can change who is expected to respond.

Some subscribers use this alert to ensure they have a "back-stop". They will have specific alerts for certain staff (Mary responds to maternity posts, Colin replies for cardiology, and so on). And to make sure nothing gets missed, Brian in the Patient Experience Team will be the back-stop: if nobody responded after three days, Brian gets an alert and steps in.

I need to be sure I'm seeing all serious issues

What if you're someone in the organisation who has to keep their eyes open for the really serious issues being raised? And what if you get a lot of email anyway? It would be easy to miss something.

Well, we have an alert for that too. Here's an example of what you might do:

What's going on here? The alert covers only serious postings (we rate criticality when we moderate posts). And we'll alert you when we publish such a post, and again a day later if you haven't read it yet.

Like before, you can change the time allowed, and who has to read the post. And of course, you can filter the alert to a specific service, specialty or condition just as you like.

If my response isn't helpful, I'll have another go

Responding well can be difficult. And sometimes, the first response just doesn't work well. Wouldn't it be helpful to know that, so you could respond again?

Well, if the story author marks your response as "unhelpful" then a simple alert like this will make sure you know:

And then you can post a further response, if you want.

Of course, you can also be alerted if your response is marked helpful (you know we're keen on the positives!).

What about NHS Choices posts?

If you are in England, you might know that we aim to bring all your NHS Choices posts onto Patient Opinion too. (We also aim to send your PO posts back to Choices.)

Often, subscribers want to know if a Choices post arrives on PO. That's easy too:

Summing up

So there we are: a few new ways to make sure you hear about things that matter to you on Patient Opinion. As always, every alert can be customised to just the posts that interest you, by service, speciality, location, tag and so on.

I should add that, while some alerting options are available to staff on Starter Level (free) subscriptions, others are only available in a paid subscription. If you are interested in finding out more about paid subscriptions please contact Miriam Rivas-Aguilar or Gina Alexander.

If you'd like more detail on how to set up alerts, do say. Our support blog may already have something for you, or I can blog more here.

Let me know how the alerts work for you - and also, if there are specific kinds of alert you need that we don't yet offer. We're keen to keep improving!