Release notes

We’re a small and focused team delivering regular improvements to hopefully improve your experience of using Concentric. These product release notes share the key updates with each software release.

Our priorities are shaped by what our clinician and patient users tell us, so if there are updates you’d love to see, but they haven’t made it into a release yet, let us know at hello@concentric.health.

63 - Spring cleaning continues!

27 Apr 2023

Whilst we work though a significant update in terms of the look and feel of Concentric (more on that soon…), this release just keeps a few bits of code tidy, up-to-date, and secure.

62 - Spring cleaning

19 Mar 2023

This release doesn’t have anything exciting for our users, just internal spring cleaning and improvements to some individual organisations’ integrations. Continue with your day!

61 - Configurable inactivity timeouts and session duration

21 Feb 2023

Healthcare systems are complex, and with clinical systems there’s a balance to strike between security controls, usability, and processes. Inactivity timeouts is one example. What is appropriate and acceptable may vary significantly depending on how you authorise in the first place (password, SSO, 2FA etc.), and which devices are used - for example, are shared devices used on the wards, or does everyone within the organisation login via their own mobile device with Face ID or similar used for device unlocking?

This release makes it possible for each organisation to configure what’s right for them in terms of inactivity timeouts and session duration.

60 - NHS Personal Demographics Service

13 Jan 2023

Until today, to integrate with patient demographics at an NHS organisation we’ve needed to integrate with the local system, meaning custom work for both us and the NHS organisation’s IT/integrations teams, which takes time. We’re delighted to say that we are now, following completion of the necessary NHS Digital approvals and testing, integrated with NHS Digital’s Personal Demographic Service (PDS) via their FHIR PDS API!

This means that when an organisation is happy to use the NHS number as the primary identifier in Concentric (i.e. no need to be able to search for or show a local hospital number within Concentric), this can be enabled at a moment’s notice, with no custom integration needed!

59 - NHSmail

16 Dec 2022

Continuing the theme of easing access and removing the burden of multiple logins (see releases 51 and 55), release 59 introduces NHSmail integration for SSO! So if it’s an NHS.net email address that’s associated with your Concentric account you can now use your NHSmail account to log in to Concentric 🥳

This release also improves how non-surgical treatments are managed throughout the application - previously there were a few places where the word surgery was used regardless of the type of treatment. This is now resolved, with the correct wording used regardless of whether it’s an operation, procedure, treatment or investigation.

58 - Signature pads!

25 Nov 2022

Since day 1 we’ve been asked about using signature pads with Concentric, and whilst we’ve seen some clinicians try to use various devices the experience has always been a bit hit and miss. We now formally support the Wacom STU-430 🎉, which we believe is the best signature pad option on the market. Head to https://app.concentric.health/stu-setup for guidance of how to set up the signature pad ready for use.

57 - Improving security

3 Nov 2022

Mainly internal and tenant integration specific tweaks in this release, but some changes also made in terms of cyber security in preparation for our annual, independent penetration testing.

56 - Improved log-out for single sign-on users

26 Oct 2022

For those using SSO, previously a log out of Concentric wasn’t triggering a log out of the SSO session (which might be being used by more than 1 application), meaning that it was possible to re-login to Concentric without re-entering credentials. This can cause issues particularly on shared devices. On log-out of Concentric, if signed in using SSO, we now redirect to the SSO provider’s log-out page where the user can confirm whether they do indeed mean to log out of their SSO session.

55 - Increasing delivery of information digitally

14 Oct 2022

For a number of our integrations, phone contact details are not divided into mobile and landline fields on the healthcare organisation’s side. This was leading to messages being sent to landlines - and therefore unsurprisingly not successfully reaching the patient in any usable format. Validation has been added to the information sharing pages to warn the clinician if they are trying to send to a landline.

Building on release 54, the British Spine Registry has been added as an additional consent option.

Having introduced single sign-on / active directory (AD) via Microsoft Azure in release 51, ADFS login (basically a local version of Azure AD) is now formally supported in production with our first users - this is the reason for the new ‘More ways to log in’ on the login page.

For many clinicians, titles are neither known within active directories or particularly useful to include within the Concentric workflow. Previously Concentric required titles for all clinician users and this was causing issues for project teams in terms of finding out the right title for large numbers of users. This requirement is now dropped.

54 - Broadening additional consent options

27 Sept 2022

The next few releases will see a number of additional consent options being added - many of these are specialty registries (currently we have a small number such as the National Joint Registry embedded), but the first to be added is a ‘sensitive disposal of pregnancy tissues’ consent (often called an SD1 form). This has been enabled at the organisations where its use within Concentric has been approved. Enabling SD1 has laid the foundations for broadening what we can do via additional consents, with more flexibility around multiple linked questions and form logic.

NHS number formatting has also been updated to match the requirements of the relevant data standards, and validation has been introduced to ensure that NHS numbers on patient records (either fetched from integration or manually added by clinicians) are genuine NHS numbers - to reduce the risks associated with miskeying and data errors.

Earlier releases

53 - Improving the onboarding experience

9 Sept 2022

Test patients get used a lot at some Concentric deployments - some of our test patients have many hundreds of consent episodes on their record. The amount of data being loaded on landing on these records was getting a bit silly and was slowing the experience down. We’re not keen on anything feeling slow within Concentric and were sad that this was often clinicians’ onboarding experience of Concentric… so we sorted it out.

52 - Improved account switching

24 Aug 2022

For those of you working across different organisations it’s always been a bit annoying to switch between Concentric accounts - needing to log out and back in. You can now just click ‘Switch organisation’ in the top right account menu.

There are a few other little improvements and bug fixes in this release. We noticed that when clinicians were adding custom indications rarely was any useful additional information added in the previously required ‘description’ field, usually just copy and paste of the indication name. You’ll be pleased to know this field is now optional. And those of you using Grammarly will have noticed an issue with the treatment search page - this is now fixed so you can re-enable Grammarly on concentric.health pages.

51 - Single Sign-On Is Here!

8 Aug 2022

If it’s been set up be your healthcare organisation you can now log in to Concentric using your Microsoft account. That’s one less username and password to remember 👌

50 - User authentication improvements

27 July 2022

As part of a larger package of work around user authentication that will span more than one release, release 50 improves the interaction between Concentric and password managers, and improves the error messages across a number of different authentication related scenarios.

49 - Improving the feedback experience

4 July 2022

We’ve moved our clinician feedback, improving the feedback experience and making it easier for us to analyse and respond to feedback.

48 - ‘Spring’ cleaning

23 June 2022

Internal tidying up and some prep work for things coming soon!

47 - Bye bye IE11!

17 June 2022

We’re pretty pleased to see this release. Microsoft have now formally retired IE11 which means we’re dropping our support for this legacy browser. If users try to access Concentric via IE11 they’ll now get a page directing them to use a modern browser. This is good news - it means we can start to do some nicer things in the user interface that would previously have caused issues in IE11.

46 - TOTP (no not Top Of The Pops…)

18 May 2022

Admin Concentric accounts have always required two factor authentication (2FA) but now healthcare organisations have the option to enable this for all clinician users. This is done via TOTP codes (Time-based One-Time Password not Top Of The Pops!) via an authenticator application so it’s more secure but adds a step to login flows and requires clinicians to have their mobile phone available to login.

45 - Your most requested feature

13 May 2022

In our clinician survey earlier this year there were two clear front runners in terms of changes that would make a difference to clinicians’ experience of using Concentric. Top of the list was quick access to your personal most used templates, alongside the ability to search templates. And so here we are… 🙂

44 - Clearer comms, better onboarding

20 April 2022

A few small but important tweaks in this release. To improve the trust that patients have in emails received from clinicians via Concentric we now reference both the clinician sending the information and the patient’s consultant (if they are different people) and also add a link to information on the healthcare organisation’s website about their use of Concentric.

To improve the onboarding experience for clinicians we now embed important healthcare organisation specific onboarding information into clinician account setup emails.

43 - Making integrations more robust

30 March 2022

Not many user-facing changes in this release - mostly integration related changes to make these more robust, handle integration failures better, and share clearer messaging with clinicians when these occur.

42 - Notas de lanzamiento

22 March 2022

That’s ‘release notes’ in Spanish! Both clinician and patient app are now fully functional across both Google and Apple automated browser translations, meaning that Concentric can be instantly translated into over 100 languages to support consent conversations in the patient’s preferred language. Our knowledge bank has more details about language translation and continued vital role of an interpreter.