The SystmOne Appointment invitations tools were released in 2021 to assist with COVID vaccination clinics; however, the functionality is flexible to be used for any type of clinic/appointment and can be used for both bulk and individual patient invites. For example; blood tests, annual reviews and clinician's inviting patients to book follow-ups or face-to-face appointments following triage.

Documentation and a video guide is available from TPP. 

Note: The first two minutes of the video below relates only to Organisation Group owners that manage your Configured Lists.

TPP's written full guidance is available within SystmOne, which includes information about tracking invites and prompts to staff if the patient books the appointment by other means. i.e. By phone/in-person

Help > Support & FAQs > Documentation & Training - Relevant documents include:

• Appointment Invitations
• Communications Annexe User Guide (for message preset configuration etc)

Source: TPP Learning Academy

Notes from the ICB Clinical Systems team

Need a different 'Appointment Invitation type'?

'Appointment Invitations Types' are part of SystmOne 'Configured List' functionality; new list items are created by 'Organisation Group' owners. The ICB team can create list items where they are suitable for all services in the region; if list items are needed that are tailored for a smaller grouping (such as a PCN) requests need to to go the relevant Organisation Group owner.

Organisation Preferences

Permit patients to book appointments in the next X days

The maximum period that can be set is 90 days. For many surgeries it may be appropriate to set this as your standard, especially if making effective use of patient invitations for procedures as blood tests and long term condition reviews.

Appointment Invitation Settings

In the video, the focus is on Rota Types or Teams. These have their place; however, many examples of appointment invites may exclusively use a Slot Type.

Note: Still using SystmOne 'User Groups' after 2022? Switch it off and use SystmOne 'Teams'!

Sending individual/ad-hoc invites

TPP demonstrate adding a 'Send invite' buttons to toolbars. If you will be using multiple invitation types, consider instead creating a template with a 'Quick Action Button' button for each invite type. The template can then be a single button for the toolbar of relevant teams or accessed through Launcher (F12).

What's Communication Annexe?

Comms Annexe was released in 2020 to support sending messages to patients via app notification, email and SMS from one screen. It can also be used to send health Questionnaires (including coded data) for patients to complete and supports (where enabled per message) patients to reply with text or attachments.

If your surgery has continued to use the outdated 'Send SMS message' and 'Send e-mail' functions, please have your SystmOne lead convert historic 'Organisation presets' for SMS/email to Message presets and replace toolbar/template buttons (etc) that use the old SMS/email options to 'Launch Communication Annexe'.

Message length

Please note TPP's demonstation includes inappropriate information/length for SMS. Please remember the first S stands for short. Longer/detailed messages should be sent via email, app notification or letter. See also: SMS Dos and Don'ts