Defining a completed care follow-up without arguing for an hour

Care app workshops stall when “follow-up complete” means three different things in one room: SMS acknowledged, questionnaire submitted, or clinician closed the episode.

A definition that travels

We ask teams to adopt a layered set:

1. Patient response — the patient submitted the requested check-in.
2. Clinical acknowledgement — a clinician marked the response reviewed.
3. Episode closed — no further action required for that visit.

Report all three. Never collapse them into one green number on a management slide. Clinics that insist on a single metric usually discover later that nurses were closing episodes to clear queues while questionnaires still sat unanswered.

Language note

In bilingual apps, keep the event name stable in English internally and localise only the patient-facing copy. Renaming events when translating Bahasa labels is a common source of broken month-on-month charts.