Product Updates

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.

This month introduces an important update to cataract post-operative workflows, improving flexibility for optometrists while maintaining clear ownership and visibility for hospital teams.

👁️ Cataract post-op assessments can now be created by optometrists

What’s new

• Optometrists can now create cataract post-operative assessments when no existing measure has been set up.

• When creating an assessment, optometrists must select the organisation that performed the surgery and surgery date.

• Submitted assessments are linked to the relevant hospital organisation for visibility and reporting.

• Hospital teams can review and update key details (such as surgery date or clinician) where needed.

• Hospitals can also reject assessments if required, with a reason and feedback provided.

• Visibility of post-op assessments is now aligned so that only relevant organisations (creating or surgical) can view the data.

Why we made this change

This update gives optometrists a reliable way to record post-operative outcomes when a pre-created measure isn’t available, helping ensure patient follow-up can still be completed without delay.

At the same time, linking assessments to the surgical organisation maintains accurate ownership, supports reporting, and keeps information relevant to the teams involved in care.

📎 File uploads now available when accepting referrals

What’s new

• Hospital users can now upload files (such as consultant letters) when accepting a referral.

• Uploaded files are visible within the referral response and in the patient record’s Uploaded files section.

Why we made this change

In some cases, important documents need to be shared alongside referral decisions.
Allowing files to be uploaded as part of the acceptance workflow keeps everything in one place, making it easier to share, access and manage supporting information within the platform.

🚀 Introducing Advice & Guidance (A&G)

We’ve launched Advice & Guidance — a major new capability designed to strengthen collaboration between community optometry and hospital ophthalmology within Lutra Health.

What’s new

• Optometrists can now submit Advice & Guidance requests directly within Lutra.

• Ophthalmologists can review cases and provide structured clinical input in context.

• Communication is secure, two-way, and fully recorded within the platform.

• All Advice & Guidance interactions are linked to the relevant patient record for continuity and auditability.

• Where appropriate, an Advice & Guidance request can progress directly to an accepted referral.

How it works

1. Submit a case – An optometrist creates an Advice & Guidance request, including relevant clinical details and supporting files.

2. Specialist review – An ophthalmologist reviews the case within Lutra and provides guidance or recommendations.

3. Clear outcome – The request may be resolved with advice, further information requested, or progressed to an accepted referral, depending on the clinical need.

Why we made this change
Timely collaboration between community and hospital teams is essential for delivering joined-up eye care.

Advice & Guidance enables faster access to specialist input, supports confident clinical decision-making, and allows patients to move seamlessly to referral where required — this marks an important step toward a more connected and streamlined eye care pathway.

✨ Streamlined patient registration

What’s new

• The patient registration process has been simplified to focus on essential information at the point of creation.

• Non-essential fields have been removed from the initial registration screen to make the process quicker.

• All patient details can still be viewed and edited after registration.

Why we made this change
As part of our ongoing usability improvements, we’ve reduced unnecessary data entry during registration. This helps make the process faster and more focused, while keeping full flexibility to add or update information later.

📎 Simplified file uploads for cataract referrals and post-op

What’s new

• For cataract referrals (Standard and Quick) and cataract post-op assessments, you can now upload multiple files at once.

• File uploads for cataract cases no longer require manual tagging by eye or file type.

• File upload behaviour for non-cataract referrals remains unchanged.

Why we made this change
Uploading and tagging files individually added unnecessary friction for cataract workflows.
This update simplifies the process by removing manual tagging and enabling multi-file upload, making it quicker and easier to submit supporting documents where detailed file categorisation isn’t required.