Meet the New Spruce

Healthcare professionals deserve quality tools designed with them in mind. Tools that help expand their reach and help them manage the rising tide of digital communication while staving off burnout.

At Spruce, we’ve been hard at work for a long time on a significant upgrade of our core product. When you next update the Spruce app, you’ll see the result and can take advantage of all of the new capabilities with no new charge. It is our hope that you find that you now have more power and flexibility in how you and your team work, and that you can cover more ground with less time and more peace of mind. Updates include:

• Filter Your Inbox. Work your way with saved filters that let you easily surface the right conversations. Set up your filter “inboxes” the exact way that you and your team want, and change them yourself at any time, in any way that you want.
• Introducing Contacts. A new contact book gives you a complete, coordinated view of every conversation between you and each of your patients. You can add your own custom data fields, tags, and notes to your contacts, letting you manage care in the exact way that matters to you.
• Upgraded Communications. You can now choose exactly which participants you want to have in each secure conversation. Include multiple patients or caregivers in one chat, or include only certain members of your care team. You can also have multiple chat threads with the same patient, so you can easily discuss separate topics. Additional improvements include advanced bulk messaging (better targeting, broader reach), flexible filing of conversations to relevant contacts, and a configurable system to let you automatically assign conversations to the right members of your team.
• Much More. Self-service patient list upload, a dedicated iPad app, configurable automated welcome messages for new patients, enhanced eFax management, improved multiple-message export, as well as a new look (hello, new logo!) and a MUCH faster app interface on all platforms. With even more that we can’t fit here without making this list too long.

Read on for a quick guided tour of some of the best new features and updates! And make sure to check out our new and improved Help Center, where you can find articles to help you navigate the important details of everything that Spruce offers.

Key Features and Updates 

Contacts

You now have a contact book, similar to what you have on your cell phone, where you can save and view all of the different people you communicate with on Spruce. This can be patients, doctors’ offices, pharmacies, etc. Within this contact book, you can filter your contacts to view sub-lists of your choosing, such as a list of all of your patients who have been invited to Spruce but haven’t yet downloaded the app. Learn more.

Conversation grouping

The introduction of contacts now allows you to see all of your communication with any contact in one place, regardless of the channel you’re using to communicate (e.g., SMS texting, phone calls, secure messages, etc.). Learn more.

Customizable inbox views and contact lists

Spruce now lets you create custom “filtered” views of your conversations, as well as of the contacts in your contact book. Want to have an inbox display of just your SMS conversations? You can do that now. How about a special view just for patients with a certain tag? Yep, also easy. This is an incredibly powerful change, and we really recommend that you watch this four-minute video where we cover these awesome new custom inbox views and contact lists. We promise this one is important and worth it!

New web app design

If you use Spruce from your web browser, things will now look a bit different (and work much better!) Watch this two-minute overview video of the new web app, where we describe the key changes. Importantly, the layout is very customizable, so you can match what you see to your workflow and screen-space needs.

Improved patient connection experience

Getting your patients on the Spruce app is critical to being able to use secure messaging, video chat, and other important Spruce features. We’ve made it easier to do this in Spruce 4.0, adding extra ways to reach your patients and customize the invitations they receive. Here’s a quick video showing off the new patient invitation features.

Fax

A long-requested feature: Individual faxes on Spruce 4.0 now show up as their own separate conversations. This allows you to assign them to the correct contact, coordinate around them better with your teammates, and work more easily with them in general. Here’s a two-minute video showing you the new way faxing on Spruce works.

Bulk copy and pasting of messages

Copying your Spruce communication into your EHR (or anywhere else) just got way better: We now have a simple and fast way to select as many messages as you want, and easily transfer them to any other program that you use. Watch a demo of this improved message copy-paste feature.

Bulk messaging

Bulk messaging is a great way to communicate with all, or with certain subsets of, your patients at one time, without having to individually message each person. See how we’ve significantly improved bulk messaging in Spruce!

Linking contacts to Hint and Elation

In this new version of Spruce, you no longer need to link a patient to Hint / Elation multiple times because all linking is done at the contact level. This is the ideal setup because each patient should only have one contact, whereas they’ll typically have multiple conversations. Here is a video demonstrating the new linking process.

Here also is a video demonstrating how to move conversation history from Spruce to Elation.

Frequently Asked Questions 

We beta-tested this new version of Spruce with many clinics, and a few questions came up regularly.

How do I handle “multiple matching contacts”?

With the new contact book on Spruce, if a phone number belongs to two or more contacts, conversations involving that phone number will display the title of “Multiple Matching Contacts.” Watch this two-minute video to learn more about multiple matching contacts, why it happens, and how to handle it when it happens.

Why do I have some conversations marked “inactive”?

On Spruce, conversations can now involve only one sending and one receiving phone number. If your practice uses multiple Spruce phone numbers, some of your old conversations may now be marked “inactive” and will be separated into their own threads, going forward. You will only see this once, and it won’t be an issue after this point. We made a three-minute video to discuss more about conversation inactivation, what it is, and what it affects.

Onward! 

We are acutely aware of the importance of continuity for you in your care and in your operations. With that in mind, we are standing by to help make this update as smooth as possible for you. If you are encountering any challenges, please message us in your Spruce app, email us at support@sprucehealth.com, or attend one of our live Q&A sessions. Please also review our terms of service and privacy policy, as we’ve made updates for this new release. And if you are using the Spruce logo, app icon, or other similar materials, we have new versions of all Spruce brand assets to help you promote your clinic and get connected with your patients.

We hope that you find much to love in the new Spruce and that it continues to serve you well!

– Team Spruce