Conversations between practitioners & patients

Practitioners can hold conversations with Patients in Capable Health using two different methods:

• Via SMS sent to a Patient's phone
• Via chat, integrated into the frontend of your application

In both cases, the Practitioner can send their messages to the Patient from the Capable Health admin portal.

Currently, a Patient can maintain one chat conversation. Multiple Practitioners can take in a chat or SMS conversation with a Patient.

Conversations in Capable Health use Twilio under the hood. They function automatically when you start using Capable — you don’t need to sign up for your own Twilio account.

Using SMS

To use SMS, a Practitioner must initiate a conversation with a Patient. The Practitioner can take part in the SMS conversation using the Capable Health portal, or messages can be sent programmatically. The Patient must have a phone number on record in Capable and that phone number must be set as primary.

Using chat

Use Twilio’s Conversations client library to set up chat in the frontend of your app. To retrieve the Twilio token needed to use the library, call the /conversations/twilio_chat_token endpoint in the Capable Health API. You can then create a conversation. See our open-source demo app repo and the live demo site for an example of real-time chat in action.

As with SMS, Practitioners can send chat messages to Patients in the Capable Health admin portal.