Important Notice
Please be aware that Ocean’s cohort messaging service is designed to optimally handle no more than 1000 emails per site at a time. Sending numerous cohorts of 1000 emails in short succession will significantly delay the time these emails will be sent for your site and other Ocean sites. It may also result in email service providers blocking all Ocean emails from being delivered to your patients. Ocean will prioritize the sending of individual patient messages over bulk cohort emails.
We understand the need to keep your patient population informed about important updates. To send mass emails quickly (e.g. information about COVID-related updates to your entire patient population), it is recommended that you use a mass-email marketing service. If that is not an option, please only send one cohort message every 60 minutes to avoid impacting Ocean’s ability to deliver emails in a timely manner.
The first step to send a group message in Ocean is to obtain a file from your EMR. This file contains the list of patients that you are targeting in your group message. Each EMR has a unique way of obtaining this file, so please expand the appropriate tab below for instructions for your specific EMR.
Warnings
- Obtaining a cohort file from your EMR is an advanced process that should only be conducted by EMR administrators. You should be comfortable creating and refining searches in your EMR and splitting search results into smaller cohorts while maintaining proper file format.
- By default, group messages in Ocean can be sent to groups with a maximum size of 100 patients. If you have exported a .csv file from your EMR and it contains more than 100 patients, please see How to Split a .csv File into Smaller Cohorts.
- Please wait at least 30 minutes between uploading a cohort and sending the cohort a message, or when uploading multiple consecutive cohorts. This ensures that Ocean has had enough time to synchronize all patients in each cohort.