Gentle nudges that keep everyone in the loop
Notifications & Reminders make sure the right people hear about the things that matter — a new booking, a confirmed appointment, an important result — without anyone having to chase updates.
What it does
- Alerts staff when a new appointment request comes in.
- Emails patients as their booking request and appointment move through each status — confirmed, completed or cancelled — every message carrying their secure portal link and QR.
- Tells the right people when a patient does something in their portal, such as
uploading a receipt or sending a message. Appointment activity reaches staff associated with that visit. A patient-only message can reach the current doctor and active clinic staff.
- Shows up to three unread patient messages in the Clinic IMS alert bar and the
total unread count beside Clinical › Messages.
- Notifies doctors of updates relevant to them — including sending a critically abnormal lab result straight to the doctor who ordered the test.
- Lets anyone follow a particular patient. Notify me on a patient's profile asks to be told when that patient's records, appointments, billing, payments, dispensing, lab work or details change — chosen by group or event by event.
- Lets clinic administrators know when a doctor asks to join their clinic.
- Reminds every patient about a day before their visit, automatically. The email says when the visit is, who they are seeing and how to reach the clinic — and carries the appointment as a calendar file, so it lands on the patient's own calendar. Nobody has to send it, no patient is reminded twice, and a patient whose email address is added later still gets the reminder they are owed.
- Carries occasional service notices from the platform itself — a change to the Terms of Use or Privacy Policy, planned maintenance, a security matter.
- Lets each person choose which notifications they want, while always delivering the truly urgent ones.
Following one patient
Role-based alerts cover the work a clinic does by position: the front desk hears about new requests, the ordering doctor hears about the result. They miss the work it does by attention — the doctor following a case they are not on duty for, the cashier waiting on one balance, the receptionist watching a visit that may move.
Notify me on the patient's profile closes that gap. Anyone who can open the file can ask to be told, choosing whole groups or individual events. Alerts arrive in the notification bell and, for doctors using the mobile app, as a push notification.
Only events after you save are sent, so switching it on never replays the record. You are not alerted about your own actions. And the alert names no patient and carries no clinical detail — it says what kind of thing happened and links back to the profile, which opens with the same permissions and the same access-log entry as always. Following a patient gives nobody access they did not already have.
Unread patient messages
Patient messaging is off until a clinic switches it on (Settings → Patient Messaging). Everything in this section — the alert bar, the unread count and the message notifications — appears only for clinics that have.
The message alert bar refreshes while staff use Clinic IMS. It shows the three newest unread messages and links each one to the patient's current appointment, or to the profile if no current appointment exists. Clinical › Messages lists every patient who still has an unread message.
The in-app alert may show the patient name and a short message preview because it sits behind Clinic IMS authentication and the right to view patients. Email and push notifications omit the patient name and message text. Staff must open Clinic IMS to read the conversation.
Why it helps
For the clinic
Fewer no-shows and fewer dropped balls. Important events are surfaced promptly so the team can act.
For doctors
Doctors are kept informed of what concerns them — on the mobile app as a push notification, or within the system — without being buried in noise.
For staff
The front desk learns about new requests and changes right away, so nothing waits unseen in an inbox.
For patients
A friendly reminder the day before a visit — with the appointment ready to drop into their own calendar — helps them turn up on time, and timely confirmations give them peace of mind.
Each person can tune their own notification preferences. Critical messages are always delivered, so nothing essential is ever silenced by accident.
How emails look
Every transactional email is built from one of two shared layouts in templates/emails/layouts/, so a template only supplies its heading and body.
- Platform mail — invoices, renewal and subscription notices, sign-up and
registration, cleanup alerts, and the password-reset notice to the platform administrator. It uses the same look as the marketing emails under /email/: the CareClinic teal header and the ACCESS Software Solutions footer.
- Clinic and company mail — booking, reminders, results, account emails,
archives and company notices. It uses the clinic's own primary colour from Settings, signs off with the clinic's name, address, phone and email, and carries a small "Sent with CareClinic" line. When no clinic is in scope, or its theme cannot be read, it uses the default blue and the name the template was given.
MailTemplateRenderer picks the layout from the template's folder (admin/, billing/ and open/ are platform mail; everything else is clinic mail), with a short exception list in the class. A caller whose mail does not follow its folder passes 'mail_layout' => 'platform' or 'tenant'. Templates {% extends mail_layout %}, fill the title, optional preheader, content and footer_note blocks, and use {{ mail_button(url, 'Label') }} for the call to action (styled inline, because mail clients strip <style> blocks). Text and button colours are derived from the clinic's primary colour and checked for contrast, so a pale primary still gets readable button text.
Change/digest notices sent from the cron without a clinic in scope use the default blue.
No migration or deployment step: clear the container cache (rm -rf storage/cache/container-*) so the renderer picks up the theme resolver.