When building more longitudinal type of care flows, you'll likely have a bunch of messages and forms carefully laid out in time which help a patient through their entire care journey. In a perfect world, we expect patients and clinicians to be on top of things and complete their pending activities per the ideal designed timeframe.
Yet, when real life kicks in and your patient skips their first monthly follow-up, the entire data collection is at risk when suddenly the "month 1 follow-up" is completed at a later date and you no longer have control over what data gets inserted in what outstanding activity at what time.
Let us introduce you to Action expiration! Through setting an expiry timeframe, the care flow will skip the action after a certain period of time, hereby you can control that the recipient no longer has to read the message or fill in the open form and ensures you have control over what is still relevant at later moments in time.
Enable action expiration
Navigate to a Message or Form action in your care flow
In the configuration of your action, scroll all the way to the bottom and toggle on "Enable action expiration"
Set the timeframe for the expiry, by selecting the value and the appropriate unit (minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years)
⚠️ Use this feature with caution: when you let forms expire that intend to capture data points used in conditional logic or timing reference further down the flow, those data points will be empty and the conditional logic/timing references will fail. Therefore we advise you to not use expiry on forms that collect such data which is needed for care flow evaluation at runtime.
Action expiration at runtime
Handling the expiry of actions at runtime, meaning following up on the valid timeline, is fully taken care of by the Awell platform.
You can see and consult all expired activities by navigating to a patient's Activity feed (which is referenced in reviewing and interacting with activities, or following up on pending activities) and filtering on the status "Expired":
