Spruce: Medical Communication

Built for communication between care teams and patients

Spruce: Medical Communication is a healthcare messaging app from Spruce Health. It gives patients a secure place to exchange messages, photos, alerts and video calls with a participating care team. For healthcare professionals, it brings messaging, calling, faxing and telehealth into one service rather than splitting those tasks across separate apps.

What patients can actually use

The patient experience is fairly focused: connect with a healthcare provider, send and receive secure messages, share photos when needed, and join video calls. You need an invitation from a care team to make use of those features, so the app is most useful when your provider already works through Spruce. It is not a general-purpose messenger with a useful healthcare mode added on.

More than a patient inbox for professionals

On the provider side, Spruce supports shared team inboxes, internal collaboration, secure texting, two-way faxing, phone functions and video communication. Teams can also use patient lists, conversation tags, message templates, scheduled messages, automated replies and routing tools. Security and compliance features include two-factor login, audit logging and a HIPAA business associate agreement. That breadth makes the app relevant to practices managing a high volume of patient contact, not just one-to-one conversations.

The trade-off

Spruce’s main limitation is also its defining condition: its value depends on whether your healthcare organization uses it. A patient cannot get much from the app without that connection, while a small practice may find the broader communication and workflow tools unnecessary. Still, the strong user response—4.9 from more than 16,000 ratings and 500,000+ installs—suggests it is meeting a clear need for the teams and patients it serves.