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 support@concentric.health.

86 - Custom templates: Editing existing Concentric templates

21st November 2024

There are three updates of particular note in release 86:

• Custom templates: Editing existing Concentric templates
• Adding context to the risks section in patient-facing views
• Improved error messaging for integration issues

Custom templates: Editing existing Concentric templates: Release 83 saw the eagerly-awaited release of custom templates. The initial version allowed template creation from a blank starting point. We’d anticipated that having the option to start from an existing Concentric starting point would be the most requested iteration, and so it proved to be!

When creating a custom template, you now have the option to start from an existing Concentric template or from a blank template.

Adding context to the risks section in patient-facing views: The appropriate presentation of risk is a key element of the informed consent process. This release sees introductory paragraphs added prior to the risk categories in both consult view and within the patient application. The text aims to frame how to think about individual risk, what the information aims to cover, and the process a patient should expect.

Improved error messaging for integration issues: Previously, when there was an issue searching for a patient record via an integration, we’d show the same error regardless of the underlying cause.

Under the hood, Concentric knew more detail of what was going on – for example, whether it was an issue with the connection to the hospital’s systems, if there was an issue with the specific record, or whether it was just taking a little longer than usual to receive a response – but wasn’t showing this detail to the user. We now do, with helpful information about whether the issue is likely to resolve itself momentarily, what might be done to fix it, and what to do in the meantime.

85 - Cloud connector standardisation

17th October 2024

Mainly under the bonnet updates in release 85, including a second phase of standardisation and optimisation of our ‘Cloud connector’ following on from release 79 (Integration standardisation) – moving all connector integrations over to the new connector version.

84 - Updated NHSmail login

1st October 2024

NHSmail is used by many organisations as the authentication mechanism to log into Concentric, and this release sees Concentric being updated to the new version of NHSmail. The user flow doesn’t change significantly from a clinician’s perspective, but this new version gives organisations more control over authentication requirements in different settings. Read on if you’ve been having 2FA issues…

Over the past year, NHS England has introduced 2-factor authentication (2FA/MFA) by default for NHSmail login to reduce the risk of personal data breaches. This has resulted in login challenges - to Concentric and other clinical applications - for many users who lack easy access to their personal mobile devices while working clinically, and has led to frustration at the additional login time.

In response to these frustrations, and acknowledging that when connected to certain secure networks the security benefits of requiring 2FA may be outweighed by practical considerations, NHSmail has released an updated version which gives organisations control over when 2FA is required to login to clinical applications via NHSmail. Concentric moves over to using this new version for NHSmail login with release 84.

Technical details of how this works and the configuration requirements, written for NHS Trust IT teams, are shared in NHSmail’s Multi-Factor Authentication Conditional Access Service Overview. Our partner NHS Trusts have been informed of this change and the updated options regarding 2FA. Thanks to NHS England’s NHSmail team for supporting our transition to the new version.

83 - Custom templates!

6th September 2024

‘Custom templates’ is our name for new functionality that allows clinicians to save and update their own templates within the Concentric application while maintaining continued access to Concentric templates. By some margin, ‘custom templates’ has been our most requested feature from clinicians over the last couple of years so we’re pretty delighted to see this release land 🎉

Our custom templates page shares a video guide, walks through the new workflows possible with the functionality, and describes ongoing related work.

82 - Read-only improvements

2nd August 2024

We’ve changed how episodes are shown in clinician app for read-only users, which now shows both selected and unselected concepts as checkboxes on the template. Previously only selected concepts were shown to read-only users, leading to uncertainty regarding what was on the template and whether modifications had been made.

81 - Internal tidying

5th July 2024

Nothing of particular note to users in this release, just minor tidying here and there, such as realising we’d been using ‘occured’ all over the place instead of ‘occurred’. Very naughty 🫣.

80 - iframes and Carebit integration

8th June 2024

This release focuses on making Concentric fit even more seamlessly into clinical workflows.

Using Concentric within an iframe - Many organisations use a ‘patient context launch’ to open a Concentric patient record from within their electronic health record (EHR). Prior to release 80 the only way to do so was to open Concentric within a different browser tab/window. This release makes it possible to use Concentric embedded within the EHR, within what is called an ‘iframe’.

To enable use within a patient record in the EHR, functionality has been introduced to optionally lock a Concentric window to a single patient record, most noticeably by removing the search bar. This ensures that it’s not possible to be looking at a different patient within Concentric compared to the EHR record it’s sat within.

Carebit integration - Carebit is a leading practice management application, used widely within private practice. This release allows users subscribed to both systems to effortlessly switch from a patient record in Carebit to Concentric, including integrations for patient demographics into Concentric and sending consent form PDFs back into Carebit.

Earlier releases

79 - Integration standardisation

27 Apr 2024

Most of the changes in this release will not directly impact end-users, with the focus being on standardising and optimising how our ‘Cloud connector’ – used by many organisations to connect Concentric to internal systems (e.g. EHR and PAS) – works.

Also in this release: Some users had reported that newer versions of the signature pad we support, the Wacom STU-430, were not connecting to Concentric successfully. This was due to a Wacom firmware update. This release enables use of Concentric with this newer version, and maintains support for the previous version.

78 - Launch in patient context improvements

19 Apr 2024

Most organisations utilise a ‘launch in patient context’ integration within the electronic health record (EHR) – a button that opens Concentric within the patient record that is open in the EHR. This release:

• supports using ‘launch in patient context’ for a clinician’s first login, allowing onboarding and user terms to be agreed before landing within the appropriate patient record, and
• supports the use of Oracle/Cerner Millenium toolbar launch regardless of whether an individual patient record is open. This means that the patient record is opened if a patient record is open in Millenium, or goes to the Concentric app homepage otherwise.

77 - Editing treatment lay descriptions

29 Mar 2024

Treatment template names are often edited by clinicians to ensure the Concentric episode is an appropriate reflection of the consent conversation. Prior to this release it was not possible to edit the corresponding treatment lay description, meaning that significant modification of the treatment name could lead to inappropriate information being shared within the original lay description. It is now possible to edit the description within clinician view:

The treatment name and description are edited within the same view, supporting clinicians to ensure that the two remain consistent:

Bug fixes within this release:

• Resolved issue where double adding a risk to different timing categories caused a broken consent episode state.
• Resolved issue where opening Concentric PDFs in Adobe Acrobat caused a popup warning regarding displaying the font correctly.

76 - Improved mobile experience

15 Mar 2024

Prior to release 76 there were scenarios – mostly on mobiles due to the smaller screen size and the interaction with the on-screen keyboard - where a newly added element within clinician view would not be initially visible within the viewport. This meant that users were scrolling to confirm that the element had been successfully added. Concentric now automatically scrolls to the added or edited element if it would otherwise not be in view, reducing the cognitive load for clinician users.

Presentation of multiple confirmation of consent events within a consent episode has been improved, with these now more clearly outlined as separate events within the episode history.

75 - Admin app: New dashboards and better performance

25 Feb 2024

Our admin application has had a makeover! The admin app is generally used by project teams and contains dashboards to explore usage, tooling to manage user accounts, and announcement banner functionality (introduced in release 73). You can read more about the admin application in our admin user guide.

The dashboards are now easier to navigate, are significantly faster, and new queries have been added based on user feedback. Performance within the admin application for organisations with large number of Concentric accounts (many now have thousands of accounts) has also improved, aided by pagination and more appropriate loading of records.

Several additional consents have been added, allowing the recording of consent relating to the BSUG database, BOFAS registry and CMR Surgical’s Registry and Versius Video platform. Explore how additional consents work, and which are currently in Concentric in our additional consents page.

74 - Infrastructure and database upgrades

27 Jan 2024

This release was a little unusual for us, in that it involved more than a few moments of downtime. If you logged in within the 16 minutes of downtime you’ll have been one of the first ever to see our ‘down for maintenance’ page. To minimise disruption we completed the update on a Saturday night as it’s the time we see the least app traffic during the week.

The downtime was required to update some infrastructure – the software run on our application servers and optimisation of our databases. All incidents and planned maintenance are reported on the Concentric status page. You can subscribe to status updates on that page should that be helpful in your role.

73 - Read-only access and announcement banners

19 Jan 2024

Two highly requested improvements and features make it into release 73, read-only access and announcement banners! Who wants all their presents in December anyway… 🎁

Read-only

Read-only access is set in the Concentric admin application and does what it says on the tin. ‘Read-only users’ can see consent episodes within the deployment but cannot create new episodes or make changes to existing episodes. We expect this access level to be widely assigned to those who are involved in the consent pathway but don’t have consent conversations with patients themselves, e.g. ward nurses and theatre staff.

Those with read-only access will see a banner at the top of the page within Concentric:

The current state of the consent episode is shown, but no modifications can be made, for example:

Announcement banners

An announcement is a banner shown at the top of the Concentric application to logged in clinicians. It is usually used to share incident details; for example integration issues, and relevant business continuity information. For example:

Announcement banners are managed from within the Concentric admin application, where announcements can be created, edited, and withdrawn.

72 - Annual penetration testing

15 Dec 2023

As discussed in release 57, we undertake annual penetration testing, where a professional external team of friendly ‘hackers’ try to find the data security chinks in the Concentric armour. This release contains some improvements put in place prior to and as part of that process.

Other minor user-facing changes include additional anaesthetic options that can be added to templates, and a banner that is shown in place of recent episodes if there are none, to improve the onboarding process.

71 - Internal polishing

14 Nov 2023

You’re unlikely to spot the changes in this release – mostly internal polishing. Some subtle user-facing changes, such as; improvements to how non-template indications/alternatives/risks are added; and improvements to how we manage signing options on small non-touchscreen screens.

70 - Lay descriptions added to clinician view

13 Oct 2023

Clinician view (i.e. the editable interface) is designed as a ‘power-user’ interface – delivering flexibility to do what is needed, and is more information dense than the patient-facing views. Prior to release 70, however, the majority of lay descriptions (for the treatment itself, indications, alternatives, and anaesthetic options) were not visible without switching to consult view.

These lay descriptions have now been added into clinician view, with the first paragraph of the treatment lay description shown (expandable), and within expander toggles for the other elements (to mirror how risks have always behaved).

Treatment lay description

Lay description expanders

69 - Select all ‘patient information’

19 Sep 2023

Unnecessary clicks are annoying, and the more efficient Concentric is for clinicians the more time is released for valuable shared decision making conversation. Mirroring the approach for treatment risks, the ‘patient information’ section now also has a ‘select all’ button. This brings what had often been a few clicks down to one, whilst maintaining the flexibility to add non-template resources for individual patients.

68 - Design system polish

24 Aug 2023

Some nice-to-haves didn’t quite make it into release 67 and have been mopped up over the next 20 days. Buttons that were a few pixels off centre, spacing that wasn’t quite as it should have been, clickable areas that were a bit small, that sort of thing. Now fixed.

67 - Clinician app design system

4 Aug 2023

Over the last few months we’ve been rebuilding the Concentric clinician application to make it easier to use, more consistent, and a little nicer on the eye. There are some mentions of this reasonably big project - known internally as our clinician app design system release - in previous release notes, and it’s now landed! 🥳

Whilst under the covers quite a bit has changed, our aim has been that the transition should feel effortless (almost unnoticeable) for our clinician users.

Functionality is essentially unchanged, but some elements and buttons have moved to different places in the user interface. The video within the onboarding guides has been updated should it be useful to watch through.

Same. But different.

66 - Additional consents added

21 Jul 2023

This release sees the addition of 3 key additional consent options which will be used by the majority of our UK-based deployments - the National Bariatric Surgery Registry, National Hiatal Surgery Registry and National Vascular Registry - easing the workflow for enrolment onto these registries for patients and clinicians.

65 - Alignment with our new website

21 Jun 2023

Our new website has an updated structure and approach to onboarding and login guides. This release aligns the Concentric clinician application with that structure and the relevant URL’s.

64 - Simplifying the hidden stuff

18 May 2023

Thankfully most of our users don’t need to be exposed to the complexity that sits beneath the surface. Nevertheless, the more complex the base, the harder it is to iterate and improve the visible stuff. Building on releases 62 and 63, this release simplifies the way Concentric runs, moving to more industry-standard tools. Going forward we should therefore be able to spend more time doing stuff that noticeably improves the Concentric experience.

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.

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.