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.

Over the past few weeks we've been reworking how Lutra presents data so that each type of work has its own home. You no longer have to open one big inbox and click into something to get anything done. Referrals, Advice & Guidance, consultations, surgeries, post-ops and patient outcomes each have their own home.

A new home for patient care

A consistent view across all patient care, whether it’s a referral or a post-op - all can be found within the Clinical menu.

Referrals

• One page for all things referrals. Hospitals see their Incoming referrals and optoms see Outgoing ones. Both can track Drafts, and each tab shows a count so you can tell at a glance where the work is.

• Check public referrals in place. When a referral comes in through your public page, you can check the patient and start the referral right beside the original submission, with the form already filled in from the document.

Advice & Guidance

• Each request reads like a conversation. Your messages and theirs appear in order, with advice clearly marked and attachments inline.

• Always know whose move it is. To advise, Needs your info or Advice received. A dot marks anything that has changed since you last looked, and requests with fresh replies move to the top.

• Turn advice into a referral with one click, or close a request with a note. The other side is emailed each time a request moves on.

Consultations and Surgeries

• Dedicated pages for consultation and surgery records. Each record opens with its key facts and a quick way to arrange a follow-up.

Post-ops

• A new Post-op inbox for reviewing post-operative assessments.

Patient outcomes (Cat-PROM5 and PREMs)

• All of a patient's outcome measures on one page, grouped into Needs review, With patient, Scheduled and Closed.

• Scores front and centre. Each outcome highlights the score and totals to make answers / results quick to read.

• Share, resend and see the send history for each questionnaire, know what has already been sent.

The patient record

• A new Patients page and record tabs. You can move between their referrals, consultations, surgeries and outcomes from tabs at the top of their record.

• The care tracker. A patient's Overview now gives one picture of their journey: what has happened, what's expected next and anything that needs attention. The referring practice and the hospital see the same picture, so everyone is working from the same story.

• New records file themselves. When you start a new record, Lutra works out which part of the patient's care it follows, so we've removed the manual step of "which episode does this belong to?". If both eyes are in play, it only asks which eye. The form tells you where the record was filed, with a change link if it got it wrong.

• Choose who can see a record. Consultations and surgeries now have a Visibility setting: Private, Specific organisations or Public. Records shared with you are marked Shared by … so you always know where they came from.

• Outcomes tab. A patient's Cat-PROM5 and PREMs results are on their record, so you can review them without leaving it.

Dashboard and AI assistant

• Upload documents for the AI assistant from the dashboard, where you start your daym no need to navigate the app.

• Go straight from the AI assistant to the referral. Once it has read a document, the referral opens directly so you can carry on.

• NHS/CHI numbers are picked up automatically from uploaded referral letters.

Notifications

• Referring optometrists are kept in the loop. You'll get an in-app notification when the hospital accepts or declines your referral, replies to an Advice & Guidance request, reviews a post-op, records notes on a shared record or sets a surgery date. Notifications take you directly to what you want to see.

Forms that are easier to fill in

• Questions are laid out by the type of answer, so short answers sit side by side and longer ones get the room they need.

• Left and right eyes side by side on surgery forms, and eye options are stacked with clear OD / OS labels.

• Referral date can be edited and starts as today's date.

On your phone or tablet

• New mobile menu. Navigation now slides in from the left, with the sections and their menu side by side like on desktop. Tap targets are bigger too.

• A more compact patient record on small screens, so you see more of the record and less of the frame.

Some more of the little things

• The sidebar remembers whether you left it open or closed.

• A consistent set of icons across the app, so the same thing always looks the same.

• iPhone photos (HEIC) are accepted and converted automatically, and you can attach images to consultations.z

• Patient registration shows clearer messages when an identifier isn't quite right.

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

After a quiet few months on the changelog front, we're excited to share why.

Since our last update in April, the team has been focused on building Lutra Connect - the next evolution of the Lutra platform, designed to make referrals and clinical communication faster and easier for everyone involved.

While the experience has been completely redesigned, the workflows you already rely on remain available. Referrals, post-operative communications, and Advice & Guidance requests can all still be submitted through the platform, now with a simpler and more streamlined experience.

What's New

🤖 AI Assistant for Faster Referrals

Our new AI Assistant helps reduce the time needed to submit referrals.

Simply upload a document such as a referral letter, and Lutra Connect will automatically extract relevant patient and clinical information and populate the referral form for you.

This reduces manual data entry, helps minimise errors, and gets referrals submitted more quickly.

⚡ Quick and Simple Onboarding

Getting started with Lutra Connect is now much faster.

We've redesigned the onboarding process to reduce setup time and help new users start submitting referrals and requests with minimal configuration.

Whether you're joining a new pathway or inviting colleagues to the platform, getting connected is now simpler than ever.

📨 Public Referral Links

Hospitals can now create secure public referral links that allow referrals to be submitted by users who do not have a Lutra Connect account.

This makes it easier to accept referrals from a wider range of providers while ensuring information is captured in a consistent format.

💬 Advice & Guidance and Post-Op Workflows

Existing workflows haven't gone away.

Lutra Connect continues to support:

• Referrals

• Advice & Guidance requests

• Post-operative assessment submission

These workflows have been rebuilt within the new platform experience, making them easier to create, manage and respond to.

Why It Matters

Our goal with Lutra Connect is to reduce administrative burden and make communication between primary and secondary care more efficient.

By simplifying onboarding, automating data entry with AI, and making it easier for organisations to receive referrals, we're helping clinicians spend less time on paperwork and more time focusing on patients.

This launch is the foundation for future improvements, and we're looking forward to sharing more updates over the coming months.