kinnect-addin

Kinnect Relay: project brief

Version 0.5, October 2026. Owner: Brendan Yates.

Kinnect is the umbrella for the MHS clinic tools: TMS, ESK, Relay, Billing and IR Portal. Relay is the part that carries notifications between the front desk and clinicians, and the home base the other tools are reached from. This brief covers Relay.

Why it exists

A patient who arrives at the front desk shouldn’t have to wait because their clinician didn’t hear about it. A clinician running a telehealth visit shouldn’t be hunting through bookmarks for a Zoom room or the Nudge AI scribe. Relay is a single pane where the front desk and each resource (a clinician, or a device such as MagVenture or BrainsWay) tell each other what’s happening with each visit. Clinicians launch the two tools they open every visit from it, and everyone can jump to the other Kinnect workbooks.

Where it came from

Relay began as kin-nect in Floot. kin-nect had one-click “patient arrived” alerts per resource, a per-device “notify me” setting, four notification sounds (bing, boom, bop, bow) and browser pop-ups. Relay carries those features into Excel on the web, in a workbook the clinic shares. That keeps every message inside Microsoft 365, which MHS already covers for patient information, and avoids a separate vendor, login or install.

kin-nect’s Teams delivery was never wired up in Floot, and it isn’t in Relay either. IT Support: Weekly Connect, the other app in the same Floot account, is a separate product and is deliberately not part of Kinnect.

Who uses it and how

Front desk

• Sees a card for every resource with Patient arrived and Telehealth patient arrived. One click notifies that resource, with no patient details.
• Works down today’s appointment list, built from the NextGen report pasted on Appt List. Each visit has Arrived, Telehealth, Roomed, Running late and No-show buttons, and shows the last status sent for it. Roomed fills in the resource’s usual room.
• Sends anything else (Cancelled, Checked out, a short message) to one resource or to All resources, adding a LASFIR code only when it’s needed.
• Gets requests from resources in an inbox and clicks Got it to confirm.

Clinicians and devices

• Click Join Zoom or Open Nudge AI to open their own saved link in a new tab.
• Tell the front desk Ready for next patient, Send patient back or Ready for checkout in one click, or send Need help, Running behind or a short message.
• See “Your patient has arrived.” or “Your telehealth patient has arrived.” in their inbox and click Got it.

Everyone

• Sees a Sent today list showing whether each message has been seen, and by whom.
• Uses the Kinnect bar (TMS · ESK · Relay · Billing · IR Portal) to open another tool’s workbook in a new tab.

Features

Feature	Detail
Resource cards	One-click Patient arrived and Telehealth patient arrived per clinician or device, carried over from kin-nect.
Role picker	First run asks “Front desk, or which clinician or device?” and remembers the answer on that computer. Click the name at the top to switch.
Self-service resources	A clinician or device that isn’t listed can be added from the pane, and goes onto the Resources sheet.
Personal launch links	Each resource saves a Zoom room link and a Nudge AI link once, under My links. The buttons stay disabled until a link is saved.
Today’s appointments	Read from the pasted NextGen report. Headers are found by name, so column order doesn’t matter. Cancelled visits and other days are left out, and the rest are sorted by time.
Optional patient code	Any message can carry a LASFIR code. One-click appointment buttons include it only if that front-desk computer turns it on.
Notification sounds	Each computer picks bing, boom, bop, bow, a built-in chime or no sound, sets the volume, and can play a test. Settings shows which sound files were found.
Desktop pop-ups	Optional, per computer, wherever the browser allows them. They never show the patient code.
Kinnect bar	TMS · ESK · Relay · Billing · IR Portal across the top, with Relay highlighted as home. Each button opens that tool’s workbook in a new tab. A tool without a link is greyed out, and clicking it goes straight to the box in Settings to add one.
Shared tool links	The four workbook links live on the Kinnect Tools sheet, so they’re set once for everyone using the workbook, either in Settings or by typing them on the sheet. Only https:// links are accepted.
Settings	This computer: notify me on/off, sound, volume, test, pop-ups, and (front desk only) patient code on one-click alerts. Kinnect tools: the four shared workbook links.
Acknowledgement	Every message records who clicked Got it and when.
One-click setup	Set up workbook creates the Kinnect Log, Resources, Kinnect Tools and Kinnect Guide sheets and their tables.
The Ops Guide	An intranet tab (Ops Guide, next to Messages) listing every SOP from The Ops Guide SharePoint site, grouped by category and section, with search and category filters. Each title opens the SOP in SharePoint, where its own permissions apply. Anyone can open it, even before choosing a role. The index lives on the Kinnect Guide sheet, so updating the guide means editing that sheet.
Demo mode	taskpane.html?demo=1 runs on fictional data outside Excel, for training and testing.

Automations

These run without anyone clicking:

• Live updates. The pane listens for changes to the message table, including edits from other people in the shared workbook, and re-reads within about half a second. A refresh every 10 seconds catches anything the change events miss, including tool-link edits. Polling pauses while the pane is hidden.
• Alerts. A new, unacknowledged message to you plays your chosen sound, shows a red “N new messages” banner and puts the count in the browser tab title, e.g. “(2) Relay”. If turned on, it also shows a desktop pop-up. These clear when you click Got it.
• Sound fallback. If a chosen sound file is missing or slow to load, the built-in chime plays instead. A slow file is checked again on the next alert; a missing one is checked again after the pane reloads.
• Sound unlock. The first click anywhere in the pane unlocks audio, which browsers require before playing sound.
• Duplicate guard. The same alert to the same resource within 5 seconds, from a double click or two people at once, is sent once (“Already notified moments ago”). This is kin-nect’s debounce.
• LASFIR conversion. Names in the NextGen report, in “Last, First” or “First Last” form, are turned into LASFIR codes on screen. Short names give shorter codes (Ng, Al becomes NGAL). Names are never written to the log.
• Appointment filtering. Only today’s visits that aren’t cancelled are listed, sorted by time.
• Room prefill. Roomed fills in the resource’s default room from the Resources sheet.
• Tool-link carry-over. Links a computer saved in version 0.3, which stored them per computer, keep showing until someone saves the shared ones. After that the workbook’s links take over and the local copy is cleared.
• Typing is kept. The background refresh doesn’t clear a half-typed message or close an open section.

Not built yet (candidates, not promises):

• links back to Relay from TMS, ESK, Billing and IR Portal (one-way for now, by decision)
• Teams delivery through Power Automate, which kin-nect also had planned
• a daily archive of older log rows
• a Power Automate flow that refreshes Appt List from NextGen automatically
• per-resource acknowledgement for All resources messages

Safety measures

• PHI stays in Microsoft 365. Messages live only in the shared workbook. The add-in code is hosted on GitHub Pages and contains no patient data; it only reads and writes the open workbook.
• No identifier by default. As in kin-nect, one-click alerts say only “Your patient has arrived.” Adding a patient code is a deliberate choice: typed into the message form, or switched on per front-desk computer for appointment-list buttons.
• LASFIR only. The patient field accepts letters only (2 to 6, for short names) and rejects anything else. The pane reminds users not to put names or other details in the note, and notes are capped at 140 characters.
• Pop-ups stay generic. Desktop pop-ups can be seen by anyone walking past, so they never include the patient code.
• No internal links in public code. Zoom, Nudge AI, workbook and SOP links, and SOP titles, are saved in the clinic workbook, never in the public repo. The Ops Guide tab is an index, not a copy: the SOPs stay in SharePoint with their own permissions. SharePoint links aren’t patient data, but they are internal company information.
• Safe links. Only https:// links can be saved or opened, which blocks javascript: and other unsafe schemes. Links open in a new tab with noopener.
• No secrets. There are no API keys, tokens or outside services.
• Escaped output. Everything typed into the workbook is HTML-escaped before display, so a cell can’t inject script into the pane.
• Spreadsheets can’t be committed. .gitignore blocks .xlsx, .xls, .xlsm and .csv, so a real workbook or NextGen export can’t be committed by accident.
• Licensed sounds only. Sound files go in a public repo, so only add sounds you have the right to publish.
• Audit trail. Every message keeps who sent it, to whom, when, who acknowledged it and when.
• Access follows the workbook. Anyone who can open the workbook can read the log, and anyone who can edit it can change the resources and tool links. Share it only with clinic staff, invite-only.

Known limits

• Alerts only appear while the pane is open in Excel on the web.
• Browsers play sound only after the pane has been clicked once, so click the pane after opening it.
• Excel may block the desktop pop-up permission prompt inside the pane. When it does, the banner and sound still work.
• “Who am I” is set per computer and is not an identity check. Anyone at a computer can choose any role. The workbook’s own sharing is the real access control.
• One Got it marks a message seen for everyone it was sent to.
• The Kinnect bar opens a workbook; it doesn’t open that workbook’s add-in. Each workbook still needs its own add-in installed.
• The log grows without limit; the pane shows only today’s rows.
• The appointment header names are guesses until the NextGen report is built.
• Not yet run in Excel on the web. Tested only in a headless browser with fictional data.

Workbook layout

Sheet	Table	Columns
Kinnect Log	KinnectLog	ID, Sent, From, To, Patient, Status, Room, Note, Acked by, Acked at
Resources	KinnectResources	Resource, Zoom URL, Nudge URL, Room
Kinnect Tools	KinnectTools	Tool (TMS, ESK, Billing, IR Portal), Workbook link
Kinnect Guide	KinnectGuide	Category, Section, Title, Audience, Updated, Link, Purpose, Notes (the SOP index behind the Ops Guide tab)
Appt List	(none)	The NextGen report, pasted as-is

Saved per computer, in the browser: who uses the computer, notify on/off, sound, volume, pop-ups, and the patient-code switch.

Where things live

What	Where
Code	GitHub brendannyates/kinnect-addin (public; no PHI)
Live pane	https://brendannyates.github.io/kinnect-addin/taskpane.html, served from main
Demo	taskpane.html?demo=1
Sounds	assets/sounds/ (bing, boom, bop, bow)
Ribbon	Home > Kinnect > Relay (add-in name: Kinnect Relay)
Floot original	Downloads\kinnect-all-files_1.zip with 00-KINNECT-INDEX.md

Version history

Version	What changed
0.1	Skeleton: front desk and clinician messages, acknowledgements, Zoom and Nudge AI launch, NextGen appointment list, LASFIR-only patients.
0.2	Carried over kin-nect: resource cards for clinicians and devices, Patient arrived and Telehealth patient arrived, sound slots, per-computer settings, desktop pop-ups, duplicate guard, optional patient codes. The Clinicians sheet became Resources.
0.3	Renamed to Kinnect Relay. Added the Kinnect bar linking out to TMS, ESK, Billing and IR Portal, with links saved per computer.
0.4	Tool links moved into the workbook (Kinnect Tools), shared by everyone using it.
0.5	Added the Ops Guide intranet tab: a searchable index of The Ops Guide SOPs, kept on the Kinnect Guide sheet.

Rollout

1. Download the four sounds from kin-nect’s Settings page and save them in assets/sounds/ as bing, boom, bop and bow, each as .mp3, .wav, .ogg or .m4a.
2. Build the NextGen report with columns for appointment date, appointment time, patient, provider/resource and status. Match APPT_HDR in taskpane.js to its headers.
3. Upload manifest.xml in Excel on the web: Insert > Add-ins > Upload My Add-in.
4. Open a copy of the clinic workbook, then click Home > Kinnect > Relay > Set up workbook.
5. In Settings > Kinnect tools, add the TMS, ESK, Billing and IR Portal workbook links once.
6. Paste the SOP index (Documents\Kinnect Guide index.tsv) onto the Kinnect Guide sheet, under the headers.
7. Pilot at one clinic with fictional patients first, then real visits.
8. Changes go live when they merge to main. Re-upload the manifest only when manifest.xml changes.