What are Contacts?

Last updated 6 days ago

The contact record connects patients to the messages, tasks, forms, and workflows that support their care. Contacts are most commonly patients, but staff members are stored as contacts too. Everything that happens in Subflow happens in relation to a contact.

Contact records hold the information needed to support care coordination, including:

Name, phone number, and email address
Date-based milestones, such as a procedure date
Tags and segment membership
Form submission history
The Activity Log: a record of all actions and events on this contact
Notes, uploaded documents, and workflow history

✏️ Subflow stores the information needed to support care coordination. It is not a replacement for your electronic health record (EHR), which remains the legal system of record for patient information.

The contact record

A contact’s details page opens up with seven tabs. Each tab shows a different view of the contact's information.

Tab	Description
Overview	A summary of the contact, including key details, recent messages, recent activity, assigned teams, and the segments this contact belongs to.
Details	The full contact form, where you can view and edit the contact's name, phone number, tags, and any fields specific to your organization.
Activity	A record of everything that has happened on this contact, including who viewed it, what changes were made, messages sent, form submissions, and workflow steps executed.
Forms	A list of forms completed by this contact.
Workflows	All workflows this contact has been enrolled in, including running, completed, failed, and cancelled workflows.
Notes	A space for staff to write and store notes about this contact.
Documents	A place to upload and store files related to this contact.

How contacts connect to the rest of Subflow

The contact record is connected to many features on Subflow. Changes to a contact record ripple outward across messages, segments, tasks, and workflows.

When a patient submits a form, their answers are saved to their contact record and update the relevant contact fields automatically.
When a workflow sends a message or creates a task, it references the contact record to know who to act on.
When you apply a tag to a contact, that tag is stored on their record and can automatically place them into one or more segments.
When a broadcast is sent to a segment, Subflow sends individual messages to each contact in that segment based on their contact record.

Keeping contact records accurate is what keeps Subflow working correctly for your organization. A contact with an outdated phone number will not receive SMS messages. A contact missing a tag may not be included in a segment they should belong to.

Contact fields

Contact records are made up of individual data points called contact fields. Examples include a patient's name, phone number, or pain level. Contact fields are created by the Subflow team during your organization's onboarding process, based on the forms and information your organization collects.

When a patient submits a form, their answers update the relevant contact fields on their record automatically. Those updated field values then feed into segment conditions, workflow decisions, and the information staff see when reviewing a contact.

Contact forms

Forms are digital questionnaires built from contact fields. When a patient fills out a form, their answers are saved directly to their contact record. This keeps patient information current without requiring staff to update records manually. Forms can include required fields, conditional questions, and flagged responses that highlight concerning answers for staff reviews.

Teams and contact access

Teams are used to organize contacts and assign them to the appropriate group of staff members. Assigning a contact to a team helps staff identify which patients belong to their care group and ensures tasks and workflows are routed to the right people.

Create a Contact: Learn how to add a new patient to Subflow and edit an existing contact record.
Create a Segment: Learn how to build a dynamic contact group based on tags and contact field values.

Subflow Health