Developers building on the Spruce Public API can now access the author ID for conversation items — giving you a more reliable way to identify who sent a message within a conversation.
The author_id field is populated when the author maps to a stable Spruce entity: a teammate, team, your organization, or a patient who messaged via Spruce secure messaging (where the ID matches the saved contact ID).
A few things worth noting about when the field is omitted:
- Standard channel messages (SMS, voice, email, fax) — sender identity is tied to an endpoint like a phone number or email address, which can be reassigned to a different contact over time, so no ID is included
- System-generated items — or cases where the author entity couldn't be resolved
For full field documentation, see the Conversation Item API reference.