New

Choose whether to send a confirmation for care navigation requests. When you submit a care navigation request on a patient's behalf, a new "Send confirmation of submission" option lets you decide whether the patient receives a confirmation. It starts unticked for each patient, so confirmations are only sent when you choose to send one.

The option is unavailable when the patient has neither an email address nor an NHS number, and a "No email address" badge shows when there's no email on their record.

Improvements

Faster patient search, appointments and messages. Searching for patients, opening appointments and working with messages in Hero now respond more quickly. Partner apps using the Hero API should also see faster responses when reading the diary, appointment counts and sent messages.

Easier to find booking links when writing a message. When adding a booking link to a message, the search box now keeps what you've typed, jumps to the top of the matching results and shows a "Select or search for…" prompt, so you no longer lose your place.

Steadier appointment availability for EMIS practices. When EMIS is busy and limits the number of requests Hero can make, Hero now pauses briefly before trying again and keeps the appointments it has already found, so patients and staff continue to see your available slots.

Booking pages stay up to date. If a patient leaves a booking page open while we release an update, the page now refreshes to the latest version when they next use it, rather than a button not responding.

Online bookings with a 100% discount code. If you take payment for online bookings, a booking where a promotion code brings the price to £0 now completes, rather than showing an "Invalid code" message.

Fixes

Managing a booked appointment from a link. Patients who open the link to manage an appointment they've already booked now go straight to their appointment, where they can join a video consultation, reschedule or cancel, rather than seeing a "Your time slot reservation has expired" message.

Short appointment links. The short appt.herohealth.net links in appointment and video consultation messages open reliably again.

Signing in again during booking. If a patient's session expires on the booking review page, they're now asked to sign in again with their chosen appointment kept, so they can finish booking.

Cancelling straight after booking. A patient who cancels an appointment immediately after booking it now sees the right appointment, rather than an unrecognised link message.

Care navigation request confirmation page. After a patient submits a care navigation request, they now see the "Request submitted" confirmation page, rather than being taken back to the care options.

Save to record from the inbox. Messages sent from the inbox with Save to record now show as pending and then saved, so they no longer look unsaved and invite a second save that could create a duplicate entry.