Communicating With Families on Spruce

Spruce standard conversations are linked to phone numbers

Spruce conversations are organized and identified by phone number. For many patients, a phone number is used by only one person, and is therefore a unique identifier. For our practices who work with families, however, we understand it is common for parents/guardians, spouses/partners, and minor children to share a phone number.

When family members share a phone number

RECOMMENDED:

When two or more family members use the same phone number, we recommend that you maintain just one standard conversation that tracks all SMS text messages and phone calls that are exchanged with that phone number, regardless of which family member is the subject of a certain message. You should have contacts for all members of the family that are patients, but you can leave the phone number attached to just one contact (likely the one who's number it actually is).

Secure Conversations

On Spruce you can have multiple secure conversations with the same patient account, which can help in communicating with families. For example, if you have a mother and her 3 children as patients, but only the mother has a Spruce account, you can have 4 distinct secure conversations with the mother. One for her and one or each child and she can select which one she wants to use when she sends you messages. You can read more about that here.