Playbook, healthtech app
The message that has to leave this channel immediately
Complaints here split cleanly and the split is not subtle. One is about a product: a charge, an app, a week of silence. The other is about what a clinician said, missed or did, and that one is reviewed by people with clinical responsibility under a procedure that has its own clock. Nothing assembled from a document should go near the second, including a sympathetic sentence about it.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for complaints holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- A complaint about care is reviewed by people with clinical responsibility under a published procedure, so the destination is not the support queue, and an assistant sending it there has already failed.
- The person complaining is usually still relying on the service, which means the reply has to leave the door open rather than reading like the end of a relationship.
- These messages often arrive with account details in them and sometimes with information about a condition, and none of that may be repeated back, summarised or characterised in a reply.
- Some of them describe something that went wrong recently enough to still be going wrong, so the reply needs an urgent route in it as well as a complaints route.
How it arrives
- i want to complain about the clinician i saw
- nobody has replied to me in a week
- the advice i was given was wrong
- how do i make a formal complaint
- who reviews complaints about the doctors
- i want to escalate this above support
What has to be indexed for this to work
| The clinical complaints procedure, with its stages and its clock | Who reviews a complaint about care, how quickly it is acknowledged, how long each stage takes and who signs the outcome. Publish the version you would hand to somebody who asked for it, since a procedure kept internally reads as no procedure at all. |
|---|---|
| The route above your own service | Where a complaint goes once the internal stages are finished, in your own published wording. Concealing it makes the internal process look like the whole of it, which is what people complain about next. |
| The separate route for product and billing complaints | So there is somewhere correct to send the half that genuinely is a support matter, and so the clinical route is not filled with app faults. |
| The urgent route, stated inside the complaints material itself | Because a complaint about yesterday is sometimes a description of something still happening, and nobody should have to find that route on a different page. |
The reply
I am sorry, and this should reach a person rather than stop with me. Complaints about care are reviewed under our clinical complaints procedure, which sets out who looks at them and how long each stage takes, and you can ask for a copy [1]. Complaints about the app, a charge or a slow reply go to the support route on the same page [2]. I am not able to comment on what happened or on anything about your care. Leave your name, an email and what you would like looked at, and it goes across today. If any of this is still affecting you now, please contact your own doctor or the emergency services rather than waiting on a reply.
It apologises for the experience and says nothing whatever about whether anything went wrong, which is the line that has to hold in a message somebody may read back later. The two routes are named early because sorting is the only useful thing available. The closing line exists because a complaint about last Tuesday is sometimes a description of this morning.
Where it stops
The trigger. Every complaint, and immediately on any mention of harm, of a regulator, of legal advice or of a public post.
This needs a person, and it needs one today. Leave your name, an email and what you would like looked at, and it goes to the team who handle complaints, with anything about care reviewed under the procedure on our complaints page. If you are unwell now, please contact your own doctor or the emergency services first.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never comment on whether care was appropriate, whether something was missed, or whether a clinician was right.
- Never name a clinician, a team or an individual as the cause of anything.
- Never repeat back, summarise or record a description of somebody's condition taken from a complaint.
- Never suggest that going through the internal procedure first will be quicker, or discourage anybody from using the route above your service.
Questions
- Should it try to settle the small ones?
- Only by naming the right route. A cited quotation from a policy page in reply to somebody describing being let down proves that nobody read the message, which is a worse outcome than a slow reply from a person.
- How does it know a complaint is about care?
- By whether the message is about what a clinician said or did. That is a wording judgement rather than a clinical one, and where it is ambiguous the right default is the clinical route, because sending a product complaint there costs a transfer and the reverse costs a great deal more.
- Is it safe to publish the route above our own service?
- Yes, and hiding it is not. People find it anyway, and the ones who find it after being steered away arrive at that stage a great deal angrier than the ones who were told it existed.
Keep reading
- Everything for a healthtech appHealth data is a special category and clinical claims carry device rules. What a healthtech assistant answers for patients, and for buyers.
- Handling complaints in generalThe job is to route, not to resolve. Acknowledge without conceding, name the escalation route, and get it to a person fast.
- The app is awake at three in the morning and nobody else isConsultation hours, a clinician rota across time zones, and a user who has travelled. What an overnight message needs in its first line.
- The same clinician, or the sooner oneContinuity with the same clinician, a notice window, and a review that has to happen before a repeat. What is answerable without any diary.
- Erasing a health record is not the same as closing an accountA deletion request in health data carries deadlines and retention exceptions. What the assistant explains exactly, and routes immediately.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.