March 2026 SMS & Module Updates

Welcome to new practices who’ve joined us!

Paying for SMS

We’re aware that some ICBs plan to start charging practices for SMS from April. TPP have said they will soon offer NHS app integration, so hopefully it will only be an issue for a short period. Even if we have to pay, the vast majority of our messages save money compared to alternatives. For example, offering a statin via a questionnaire for 5p is considerably cheaper than sending a letter or having clinicians call patients.

In the meantime, some steps we’re taking or you can take…

• Follow our recommendations for your SMS config - How should I configure my system for sending SMS? : Welby Innovate and encourage patients to switch to email - How do I increase the use of Email and SMS? : Welby Innovate
• In our update for the new QOF year, we’re going to configure reports to use shorter messages by sending a brief message with a link to an attached letter. This will give the patient more info if they want it, but keep the main message shorter
• The one process that generates a lot of messages and adds much less value is our protocol for informing patients when their prescription has been issued. Turning that off suddenly could lead to a surge in patients contacting the practice, so we’ve developed an option to phase it out. The next message a patient receives will tell them we won’t be messaging them about this in the future, and advises them to use the NHS app to see when their prescription has been issued. Let us know if you’d like this enabling for your practice.

Prescribing Updates

• Proactive Checks / Safety alerts – its been great to get positive feedback on how these have helped you pick up patients on wrong medication or doses. They're also saving time by combining things that would have been done manually or separately. We've developed this further now to always carry out certain checks for particularly high-risk warnings when meds are issued.
• If you haven't started using these features, we'd really recommend it.
  • For clinicians - How do I record medication reviews? How do I use Proactive Med Review checks? : Welby Innovate
  • For admin staff - How do admin staff run Proactive Prescribing Checks? : Welby Innovate - let us know if you'd like the system to prompt staff to run these if its been forgotten
• Vaccine consent - We've been testing a questionnaire to get consent for spring covid campaigns. This is working really well but we've realised we can take a model a step further by inviting patients but delineating between those who have and haven't given consent. In this model, only patients who have given consent would have a PSD added in bulk and be booked with HCAs. Those who haven't consented would go straight to nurse appointments. Its going to take us a little longer to test and embed this but our plan is to roll it out across all the adult vaccination campaigns.
• Prompts - currently patients are only added to the green "A" / or booking prompt if you've told us you want this configured. We're going to make it also add patients if you've invited them recently.
• 18m imms - since building the reports for this change in December, we've realised the vaccines that are administered for the 18m imms may not have been identified by our reports. We've changed the reports to make them more robust but it is possible a patient has been invited again since having the 18m imms. If you're using these invites, we recommend reviewing any patients in this report:

 Path Updates

• We’ve updated our pathology rule names, which should make them much clearer and easier to review and enable. More details available here - How do I enable specific Auto-Review rules? : Welby Innovate. If you haven’t enabled auto-review rules yet, we’d recommend using this article to take you through what’s involved. 
• We’ve done a lot of work to make the rules more robust and effective. If there are rules you have enabled that aren’t filing satisfactory results for you, please let us know and we’ll get them working.

Recall Updates

We're working on our updates for the start of the new QOF year. If you haven't already, please sign up to join us on Wednesday, 1 April at 1 pm when we'll go through these with you -https://bit.ly/WelbyWebinar.

Please be aware that invites and questionnaires won't be available to run on Tue 31 March when we finalise and publish these changes. We don't recommend trying to invite April birth month patients before 1 April. Our system is very tightly geared around the QOF year and appointment booking guidance and AR stages won't work if patients are invited outside of the normal time frames. Plus, you won't be able to code QOF invites for exception reporting if they're sent in a different QOF year.