Continuity and the queue

Who this page is for: the practice manager asking the right operational question: what happens on the bad day?

The front door is only trustworthy if its failure behaviour is boring. Refera’s failure behaviour is designed to be exactly that.

When a connection is down

The capture channels are store-and-collect by nature, not live streams:

• Email waits in the mailbox until it is read - nothing about a Refera outage bounces a referral.
• Fax-to-email delivers a PDF into that same mailbox; the fax provider holds and retries on its own rail.
• HealthLink works like a post-office box: messages wait in the practice’s HealthLink mailbox until collected - exactly as they queue when a practice PC is off. See HealthLink.

When the connection resumes, capture picks up the queue in order. Arrival order is preserved because it is taken from the document’s own arrival, not from when Refera got to it.

When a document will not parse

Anything unparseable is held in the queue marked needs review - visible, counted, and waiting for a person. It is never silently dropped and never silently guessed at. Before activation, Refera proves the nominated mailbox is allowed, a control mailbox is denied, and one fixed patient-free test message arrives and is sealed. This proves connection and delivery, not every document shape. Unparseable real documents remain held for person review, and the practice retains the original in its existing system until Refera’s source-object lifecycle is deployed and activated.

When a draft cannot be trusted

It does not need to be - no draft sends without a person approving it. A degraded extraction day produces worse drafts and more editing, not wrong messages leaving the practice. See Draft-first.