Deliver an Audited Notification Wave

Who / when: this is mostly automatic and touches everyone — patients, clinicians, lab and pharmacy staff, the front desk. Across Veona there are dozens of wired events (an appointment confirmed, a result verified, a referral received, a staff invite, a password reset and many more). When one of those events fires, Veona sends out a notification wave: it works out who should be told, picks each recipient’s chosen channel, and delivers a deliberately content-free message — then writes the whole thing to the audit trail. You rarely “send” one by hand; you cause the event (you book the appointment, you release the result) and the wave follows on its own.

The single most important rule, first. Outbound notifications carry no patient health information — ever. A WhatsApp, SMS, USSD or email tells the recipient that something happened and where to sign in; it never puts a diagnosis, a test value or any clinical detail into a message that travels outside Veona. This is the patient-data guard, and it is built into the notification engine itself. The full detail always lives safely behind a sign-in. See Send Content-Free Notifications Across Channels for how the guard and the channels work.

1. Anyone (by acting) — do the real thing that fires the event. For example, the Front Desk books an appointment on Appointments → Book; that confirms the booking and fires the wired appointment-confirmed event. You do not press a “notify” button — the wave is triggered by the action itself.
2. The notification engine — Veona resolves who should be told for this event (here, the patient), looks up each recipient’s preferred channel, and renders the matching content-free message. The appointment confirmation, for instance, goes out with the fixed, detail-free subject “Your appointment is confirmed” — no name of the clinic department, no reason for the visit, nothing clinical.
3. The notification engine — the message is handed to the channel transport and delivered (WhatsApp, SMS, USSD or email, per the recipient’s choice). The same machinery carries staff messages too — a new staff member’s invite, for example, fires its own content-free wave with a single-use first-login link (see Invite New Staff With a Notification).
4. Administrator — to see what the engine is doing, open Admin → Notifications for the activity and Admin → Channels for the channel configuration. Every wave — what fired, to whom, on which channel, and whether it delivered — is recorded, and the underlying actions are written to the tamper-evident trail you can review on Admin → Audit Log.

Note

A “wave” is simply one event reaching everyone who should hear about it, each on their own channel, in one coordinated send. The recipient set and the channel are worked out per event and per person — a patient who prefers SMS gets an SMS, a colleague who prefers email gets an email, all from the same trigger.

Tip

Recipients are in control of how they are reached. A patient sets their preferred channel under the portal Settings (see Set Notification Preferences and Channels); the message is always content-free whatever channel they pick, and the full detail waits for them after sign-in.

Caution

There is no path that puts clinical detail into an outbound message — not for convenience, not for a single template. If a wave ever needs to convey something sensitive, it conveys only that there is something to see and a way to sign in. This is non-negotiable across the whole product, and it is enforced in the engine rather than left to each sender to remember.

What happens next: the recipients act on their nudge — a patient signs in to see the appointment, a clinician opens the chart, a colleague follows the invite link. The original event and its notifications are already recorded, so there is a complete, after-the-fact account of who was told what, when, and on which channel — with not a scrap of patient data having crossed an external wire. The result-release notification a clinician receives is exactly this pattern; see Send a Result Back to the Ordering Clinician.

Follow the trail

• Related: Send Content-Free Notifications Across Channels
• Related: Send a Result Back to the Ordering Clinician