The Patient Engagement Portal displays a "Virtual" badge on appointments that are not face-to-face for example, telephone, video, or Microsoft Teams consultations. This helps patients quickly identify which appointments are virtual and which require them to attend in person.
How it works
Rio holds the consultation medium for each appointment: Every appointment in Rio has a consultation medium a standard Rio field that describes how the appointment will be conducted, for example "Face to Face", "Teams meetings", or "Telephone". Each consultation medium has a code and a display name in Rio.
Access Elemental reads your Consultation Medium Configuration: Your Trust's Elemental Configuration contains a section called Consultation Medium Configuration. This lists each consultation medium code your Trust uses, along with a field called IsFaceToFace. This field is what tells the portal whether a particular consultation type should be treated as virtual or in person.
The sync process applies the classification to each appointment: Access Elemental runs a regular background sync that reads each appointment's consultation medium code from Rio, looks it up in your Trust's Consultation Medium Configuration, and stores the result against the appointment. This is then passed to the portal whenever a patient views their appointments.
The portal displays the appointment accordingly: If the appointment is virtual, patients will see a green "Virtual" badge, the location field will display "Virtual appointment" instead of a physical address, and map or directions links will be hidden. If the appointment is in person, the physical clinic address displays as normal.
This applies across all appointment views the appointment list, appointment details, cancellation, and rescheduling screens as well as the NHS App integration.
What your Trust needs to configure
For virtual appointments to display correctly, your Trust needs the Consultation Medium Configuration section set up in your Elemental Configuration. Each consultation medium code your Trust uses should have a corresponding entry, with the IsFaceToFace field set appropriately:
Set to Yes for in-person consultation types (e.g. Face to Face)
Set to No for virtual consultation types (e.g. Teams meetings, Telephone, Video)
If a consultation medium code is not listed in the configuration, the system defaults to treating it as in person. Patients will only see the "Virtual" badge where you have explicitly configured a consultation medium as non-face-to-face.
Default behaviour
Scenario | Result |
Consultation medium configured with IsFaceToFace = No | Appointment shows as virtual |
Consultation medium configured with IsFaceToFace = Yes | Appointment shows as in person |
Consultation medium not listed in configuration | Appointment shows as in person (default) |
Summary
The portal does not make assumptions about which Rio consultation mediums are virtual it uses your Trust's configuration. You have full control over which consultation types display as virtual by updating the Consultation Medium Configuration in your Elemental Configuration. The sync runs automatically in the background, so once configured, patients will see the correct display as soon as the next sync cycle completes.