Hello everyone. I am currently building a ‘Patient Verification’ flow in Architect. We use a Data Action to look up the patient’s record in our EHR system, but the EHR API is occasionally very slow, taking up to ten seconds to respond. This causes the Architect flow to hit the default timeout and send the call to the ‘Failure’ path. I want to improve the patient experience by playing a ‘Please Wait’ message or a short music clip if the lookup is taking longer than usual. Is there a way to implement a ‘Parallel’ wait timer in Architect while a Data Action is still executing?
I have seen this requirement in many complex IVR implementations. You cannot technically run a wait timer in ‘Parallel’ with a single Data Action block. However, you can achieve this by splitting your Data Action into two parts if your EHR API supports it (e.g., an ‘Initiate’ and a ‘Poll’ request). A simpler way is to use the ‘Timeout’ property on the Data Action block. Set it to a shorter value (like 3 seconds) and if it fails, send the call to a ‘Wait’ block that plays your message, and then ‘Loop’ back to try the Data Action again. This keeps the caller engaged while the backend system catches up!
I deal with these API timeouts during our high-volume dialer runs. To follow up on Sur37, be very careful with the ‘Loop’ strategy! If your EHR system is truly down, you do not want to trap the patient in an infinite loop of ‘Please Wait’ messages. You must add a ‘Maximum Retries’ counter to your loop. After three failed attempts, you should transfer the call to a live agent and pass the ‘Verification Failed’ status as a participant attribute so the agent knows the context. It is much better than just hanging up on the patient!