Organisation emails

15 – 20 October 2026

Lutra's emails now follow settings your organisation chooses. Owners and admins decide who receives each kind of email and when, and each person chooses how they hear about the referrals and requests they're part of. Every email says why it arrived and where to change it. This release also brings a Patients list for your organisation, surgery dates on the care tracker and a more useful AI Assistant.

Choose who gets which emails

Settings → Organisation emails replaces Communications. Owners and admins can add a shared team mailbox, which gets a link to confirm it before it receives anything. They can also choose whether owners and admins are emailed as well. Each row sets one timing for one kind of email: As it happens, Hourly round-up, Daily round-up (at 08:00) or Don't email. Choose which narrows a row to the kinds you want, and What's included shows exactly what a row sends, when and to whom.

Urgent referrals, Advice & Guidance requests and post-op checks are always sent. With no confirmed team mailbox, they go to owners and admins. A worked example on the page shows who would get an email, so you can check a change before you rely on it.

Settings for existing organisations have been carried over, so nobody's emails change until someone edits them.

Your own emails

Everyone now has Settings → My emails. Choose whether to hear about the referrals and requests you're part of, as it happens or in one daily round-up. The same page shows your organisation's emails read-only, so you can see everything you receive in one place. You can reach your email settings from your avatar menu, the notifications drawer, Members, the email inbox and the summary email itself.

Emails that say what happened

Each email now opens with the organisation it's for and a heading that names the record and what happened, such as two new referrals and a patient enquiry since 09:04. A footnote says why the email arrived and where to change it. Emails never include patient details.

Round-ups leave out anything already dealt with in Lutra, and an empty round-up isn't sent. The figures in the daily and weekly summary now match the counts on your navigation badges.

A Patients list for your organisation

The Patients page now lists every patient your organisation is linked to, with a filter, paging and Register patient. Patient search covers your organisation's patients. When you start a referral or another record, search still covers every patient on Lutra, and it says so. When nobody matches, Register a new patient is the clear next step.

Surgery dates on the care tracker

The hospital providing care can now set a pathway's surgery date from the care tracker and change it until the surgery is recorded. This also covers care the hospital started itself, such as a consultation that lists the patient for surgery. The post-op then shows as due six weeks later.

The pathway's headline follows the latest decision: the referral's acceptance, the hospital's status or a consultation's next step, whichever came last. A referral not yet accepted says it's awaiting acceptance. A finished pathway says how it ended. The tracker no longer shows surgery or post-op dates guessed from a referral's status. Every date comes from a real surgery date. Record the surgery appears once the surgery day arrives.

A more helpful AI Assistant

Confirm the patient before you start

When the AI Assistant finds a strong match, it still fills in the patient. Start now waits until you press Confirm patient, and a short summary shows where the document agrees with the record. If no text could be read from a document, it says so, suggests nobody and opens an empty form.

Answers that say where they came from

If you change a drafted answer, it's marked as edited, and Restore puts back what the document said. A question the document had no answer for says Not in the document. The AI Assistant leaves an answer blank rather than guess, and marks the ones it was unsure of Check this. Clicking a highlight in the document takes you to the field it filled.

Add documents from anywhere

Home, the AI Assistant page and Start from a document all add documents the same way, with upload progress and a way to cancel. On a phone or tablet, Take a photo adds a letter straight from the camera. Documents are now read side by side instead of queueing behind each other. Starting a referral from a document tells you how long it took from the document's arrival and how many drafted answers you kept.

Improvements

• Emails: Declined-referral emails have their own setting, and are sent only when another organisation declined the referral.

• Emails: A post-op check that records any complication now emails the hospital straight away as urgent, not just endophthalmitis.

• Emails: Email settings save as you click, and each confirmation names what changed.

• Emails: Our emails have a refreshed design.

• AI Assistant: A slow document is no longer failed while it's still being read, and a temporary problem is retried first. Try again appears only when trying again can help.

• AI Assistant: If the list can't load, it says so. The count covers every document, and Show older documents loads the rest.

• AI Assistant: Everyone in your organisation sees a document turn ready without refreshing.

• AI Assistant: On a phone, a document opens on the document itself. On a laptop, the document and the answers switch with a Document | Details toggle when there isn't room for both.

• Names: When an organisation or person can't be named, Lutra says "Another organisation" or "Someone" instead of showing an ID.

• Mobile: Buttons have larger tap targets on touch screens, and dialogs fit small screens better.

• Notifications: The notifications drawer shows only the organisation you're signed in to, alongside your own. Read, dismiss, Mark all read and Clear read update the list and badge at once, and say so if something goes wrong.

• Plans: A verified hospital without a plan now sees a banner explaining that it can't receive referrals or post-ops until it chooses one, with Choose a plan beside it.

Fixes

• Emails: "Post-op check reviewed" emails now reach the referring practice.

• Members: Fixed permission checks and admin emails for members beyond the tenth in larger organisations.

• Patients: The Patients list no longer gets cut off on shorter screens.

• AI Assistant: Fixed documents that failed to read with a permissions error after their upload scan.

• AI Assistant: Starting the next step from a document opens its form, with the document linked and the draft applied.

• AI Assistant: Clicking Create record twice on an email makes one document, not two.

• Assessments: A visual assessment with only a refraction or near vision is now shown as recorded instead of "none yet".

Thanks for all the feedback that shaped these changes. If something isn't working the way you'd expect, please let us know.