Set working hours for patient contact

Working hours are the times of day when a care flow may contact patients. A step or action due outside those hours is held and activated once the window opens again. With no window set, nothing is held.

Working hours are one window for the whole organization

1. Open Settings, at the bottom of the left navigation.
2. Open the General tab.
3. Under Working hours, choose a Timezone, then set From and To.
4. Click Save.

The same window applies every day, weekends included. Clear removes it, after which activities activate whenever they fall due.

The timezone is the organization's, not the patient's. A window of 07:00 to 20:00 in Europe/Brussels opens at 07:00 Brussels time for every patient in the organization, wherever they are.

What a working-hours window moves

Working hours apply to steps and actions:

• Due before the window opens: activation moves to that day's opening time.
• Due after the window closes: activation moves to the next day's opening time.
• Due inside the window: activation is unchanged.

Nothing is canceled or skipped; only the activation time moves.

A Timer sets the hour of day a step activates in the patient's timezone. Working hours are applied on top of that, in the organization's timezone, so a step timed for 06:00 local waits for the window if the window opens later.

While a stakeholder works through a hosted session, an activity due immediately activates straight away instead of waiting for the window, because the stakeholder is already on the page.

Activation spreads over the first 10 minutes

Held activities don't all activate at the moment the window opens. Each care flow is assigned a fixed offset of up to 10 minutes past the opening time, so a night's held activities arrive across the first 10 minutes of the window.

• A care flow's offset never changes, so it lands in the same slot every day.
• Recomputing the schedule, on a retry for instance, produces the same time.
• Everything held for the same care flow shares that offset, so one patient's overnight messages still arrive in one batch rather than trickling in.
• Activation never moves earlier than the opening time, and never past the end of that working day.

The 10-minute window is set by Awell and isn't part of organization settings.

Example

An organization sets working hours to 07:00 to 20:00 in Europe/Brussels. A care flow schedules a medication reminder for 03:20. The reminder is held overnight and sent at 07:04, along with anything else that care flow held. A second patient's care flow, held the same night, sends at 07:09.

A care team watching a worklist sees the held activities appear across those first 10 minutes rather than in a single block at 07:00.

Next steps

Next: Single sign-on — how the team signs in through the organization's own identity provider.