Messaging policies for healthcare organizations
Messaging policies are used to control which chat and channel messaging features are available to users in Microsoft Teams. They're part of the overall messaging deployment for healthcare organizations like hospitals, clinics, or doctor's offices, where having a message picked up and acted upon in a timely manner is crucial, as is knowing when messages are read.
You can use the global (Org-wide default) policy that's automatically created or create and assign custom messaging policies. Users in your organization automatically get the global policy unless you create and assign a custom policy. Edit the settings in the global policy or create and assign one or more custom policies to turn on or turn off the features that you want.
For example, you might choose to only allow certain job roles to use certain features (perhaps doctors and nurses only) and other workers (like food services staff) to get a more limited set of features. Decide for yourself what needs your organization has, the guidance here is at most a suggestion.
You manage messaging policies in the Teams admin center. To learn more, see Manage messaging policies in Teams.
The following messaging policy settings are of special interest for healthcare organizations, and should be considered when designing a custom policy used in the healthcare field.
Read receipts
Read receipts allows the sender of a chat message to know when their message was read by the recipient in 1:1 chats and in group chats of 20 people or less. Use this setting to specify whether read receipts are user controlled, on for everyone, or off for everyone. Message read receipts are important in healthcare organizations because they remove uncertainly about whether a message was read.
For healthcare applications, choose either User controlled or On for everyone. Keep in mind that when using the On for everyone setting, the only way to set receipts for the whole tenant is either to have only one messaging policy for the whole tenant (the default global policy) or to have all messaging policies in the tenant use the same settings for receipts. The read receipts feature is most effective when set to On for everyone.
Example scenario
Remy Morris, a high-risk patient, is admitted to the hospital. Sofia Krause is a nurse who is assigned as the primary care coordinator of this patient. Sofia starts a group chat with a set of doctors and other nurses who are working with the patient and starts an emergency triage. The doctors and nurses communicate and collaborate over the patient's care plan. Important and urgent messages are sent through 1:1 and group chat conversations. Sofia uses read receipts to determine whether messages sent requesting support are delivered and read by the care team.
Send urgent messages using priority notifications
A user can mark a message as urgent when sending chat messages to other users. This feature helps hospital staff alert one another when a critical incident requires their attention. Urgent messages using priority notifications notify users every two minutes for up to 20 minutes or until the recipient reads the message, maximizing the likelihood that the message is acted upon in a timely manner.
An admin can enable or disable the ability for users assigned this policy to send priority notifications. This feature is on by default. The recipient of the priority message might not have the same messaging policy, and won't be able to disable receiving priority messages. For healthcare applications, we recommend enabling the feature for at least some users, but you'll need to determine which ones.
Example scenario
Sofia Krause is readmitting a patient, Jakob Roth. Manuela Carstens, a physician, is the primary care doctor for this patient. Sofia sends an urgent message to Manuela using priority notifications asking for immediate help with triage of Jakob. Manuela's phone receives the message but Manuela didn't feel the phone vibration and doesn't reply. Teams renotifies Manuela and continues to repeatedly notify until Manuela reads the message. If read receipts are also enabled, Sofia is aware that the message was read by Manuela, even before Manuela decides how to respond.