In this article:
When monthly releases are available and what information is provided
Preparing for a release (TEST refreshes and requirements)
Requesting and scheduling your release
Testing your release
Going live and post-live considerations
Getting help and reporting issues
When are monthly releases available?
The releases are typically available on the 15th of each month. If this falls on a weekend or bank holiday, it's available from the next working day. The release number is based on the month of release in the format of YY.MM, for example, the October 2025 release is 25.10.
What supporting information is available to explain what's in each monthly release?
We'll provide a release note document for each monthly release in a format consistent with our wider products, which allows us to produce consistent documentation in a timely manner. This is available in the Release Information page after selecting Rio in our Customer Success Portal, with a document for each of the monthly releases.
Bug fixes will include Test Steps to support customers in their testing of fixes and changes. Additionally, we update the supporting suite of documents including the Rio User Admin Guide, Rio User Guide, Data Model Reference guide etc. periodically in line with new and enhanced functionality changes; these continue to available in the knowledge section of our Customer Success Portal.
Preparing for Your Monthly Release
What preparations should we make for a monthly release?
When you're starting to consider your next Rio Monthly Release (MR), we need to ensure your formally supported TEST instance is fit for purpose. If your TEST environment is either older than 6 months or is missing significant configurations or data, you'll need a refresh before testing your next MR – this is essential for successful user acceptance testing.
Requesting a TEST refresh:
These activities are now managed by our Platform Management team (DevOps). This approach ensures that platform maintenance and upgrade activities are handled by the team best equipped for them, whilst our Support team remains focused on resolving technical issues quickly.
To raise a TEST refresh request:
Log in to the customer portal and go to My Account > Projects
Locate the project titled "[Your Customer Name]: Path-to-Live Requests"
Click Create New Issue / Action
Select Action and enter the details of your request
Important: This project case process is only for requesting planned activities such as TEST refreshes and monthly release deployments. If you experience any technical issues, problems, or errors with your Rio system, these must still be logged through the normal support case process on the customer portal. Our Support team will continue to handle all technical issues and incidents.
Please be aware that our Platform Management team may need up to 8 weeks to plan, prepare, schedule and implement a TEST refresh; we're working to reduce these timescales in the near future.
For self-hosted customers:
If your organisation is self-hosted, please arrange with your IT teams/provider for a TEST database refresh including anonymisation where applicable. Our platform management team can assist with providing scripts for anonymisation and/or post-refresh TEST localisation settings if required.
We recommend you perform any appropriate TEST refresh before the window when you plan to test a Rio maintenance release, and ensure that afterwards TEST is fully operational including all test data and test harnesses for integrations.
Additional considerations:
You may also need to consider if your organisation has any planned or in-progress activity with our project services teams for implementations using your test environment which could potentially clash with Rio MR testing; if you have an Access Group project manager for any such work, please do discuss with them beforehand.
Some upgrade paths may require client-side applications to be rolled out within your organisations’ IT systems e.g. Drop Zone for Rio or Flow: APFM Identity Agent (for whiteboards/elevating Flow access from ward users to privileged users); your allocated Access Group DevOps Coordinator will highlight if the release documentation in your upgrade path requires this.
Requesting Your Monthly Release
How do I get a monthly release?
When you are ready to request your next Monthly Release (MR), please request via the project case process detailed above in the TEST refresh section (preferably citing your TEST environment refresh age or ongoing refresh request). A DevOps Coordinator will then be in touch to arrange a date for your test upgrade, to take place on or soon after the 15th of the month. Please request as soon as possible in advance to allow us to perform clash-checking and scheduling for the upgrade.
To support this, we frequently revise the release schedule using a stack-ranking system. This approach helps us prioritise upgrades based on operational impact and urgency, whilst also taking into account key constraints such as upcoming data centre migrations. This ensures that releases are scheduled in a way that best serves all customers and minimises disruption.
Whilst you don't need to provide any justification for an MR request, if you have expectations that the release includes specific functionalities or fixes, we recommend you state these so that our team can validate to ensure any explicit expectations you have would be met by the release.
Please don't request a release for any specific changes that do not yet have an alignment to an available or future release; if you require specific fixes we can only arrange a release that the respective cases have alignments to.
What happens after I request a monthly release?
Once your release request is accepted, your allocated DevOps Coordinator will be assigned to you. They will arrange a kickoff meeting 4-6 weeks before the TEST deployment date to work through our standard project timeline with you. This timeline helps maintain momentum and keeps releases on track by providing clearer communication around key milestones such as:
Post-refresh readiness checks
Test Upgrade
UAT (User Acceptance Testing) dates
Go-live readiness checkpoints
Go-live
Rescheduling criteria
This structured approach ensures both your team and our team are aligned on expectations and deliverables throughout the release process.
Testing Your Monthly Release
Can I test the release on an environment that contains my live configuration?
Yes – indeed we insist on this for ease of testing. The release will be tested on your organisations formally supported TEST environment that is nominated for MR delivery.
Please ensure your Rio TEST environment has been recently refreshed from your live system (see above section for preparations) and that your organisation utilises appropriate change control methods to make sure you apply configuration changes in your Rio test environment before equally applying them to Live, for example by using the Configuration Migration Tool (CMT), which should result in equivalent configuration between TEST and LIVE.
For customers using NHS Spine for smartcard authentication, you must test the release on your Spine-enabled test instance for appropriate equivalency.
How should we test the monthly release?
As part of the kick-off meeting your allocated DevOps Coordinator will confirm the testing length - usually 2 weeks, to allow you to align your testing resources accordingly and hopefully confirm acceptance of the release.
For your testing we ask you to perform prioritised regression testing on your key patient journeys and business processes, ensuring appropriate coverage of your use of Rio using your organisation-specific functional map including additional modules and integrations; we will provide the latest copy of the functional map for your organisation before your test window. Please ensure you involve applicable clinical staff as part of your testing acceptance.
Are there any wider considerations when testing?
A completed upgrade will place all upgraded Rio instances into Maintenance Mode. Please ensure you have users with maintenance mode access prior to the upgrade and familiarise your team with disabling this mode ahead of the go-live where the same would need to be repeated to enable end-users to access Rio.
If your upgrade path includes more than one Monthly Release (MR), please refer to the applicable release note documents for an overview of changes. The Excel release notes document is cumulative and contains all changes across multiple releases - you can filter by individual release versions if you need to review specific changes.
Whilst your Rio team doesn't need to specifically test each individual change listed in the release notes for your upgrade path, please consider which changes you would like to explicitly test as part of your verification process.
Important: Whilst your Rio test system is temporarily on a newer version of Rio compared to your live environment, please ensure that there is no attempt to export/import items from Assessment Maintenance or Configuration Migration Tool (CMT) between these instances due to the differing versions of Rio between live and test.
Whilst your Rio test system is temporarily on a newer version of Rio compared to your live environment, your LIVECOPY environment can be used to test any datafixes and other tasks. If you wish for this environment to be refreshed at the same time as your test environment, please let your DevOps Coordinator know.
What happens if an issue we report in testing requires a software change?
The process is similar to that of a support case, where we initially review and later align to a future monthly release. We consider various factors when determining the prioritisation for the necessary fix, including (but not limited to) the severity rating you provide, as well as any other issues reported by other customers in their testing. If we’re unable to provide agreeable mitigations or workarounds for cases raised as critical or major which prevents your agreement to adopt the release, you may need to defer your testing until a later monthly release version is available with the required corrections.
Going Live with Your Monthly Release
Will a monthly release require downtime?
Yes. Downtime is typically approximately 2-3 hours, although various factors such as customer estate, data size and upgrade path can influence this. Your DevOps Coordinator will plan the specific downtime window with you.
Access doesn’t host our Rio system, will there be any differences?
For our customers who are hosting either on-premises or via third party partners, you need to consider the backup contingencies you need on a downtime-basis alongside our deployment of the releases. Where you require manual intervention for backups, this may impact the duration of the downtime period. We recommend a considered move to Access Group hosting solutions so that you can benefit from the advantages of a natively hosted application.
When will we adopt the monthly release into live?
For your Monthly Release (MR) live deployment, upon your agreement to proceed following testing we will then schedule this based on resource availability in order to perform an attended deployment. We ask for your cooperation to reach a mutually agreeable timeslot that is out of core business hours but at a time that allows colleagues from both organisations to be present.
When we adopt the monthly release into live, how do we verify this?
The Rio EPR provides a maintenance mode in which only pre-configured administrators or testers can access the system (i.e., with end users initially disabled). As with the prior testing, before applying the monthly release we ask you to configure these users in advance. After applying the release, Rio is automatically set with maintenance mode enabled, where general end users will not be able to access the system until you manually turn off maintenance mode. This will allow any optional testing without the risk of data entry from the wider user base. You can configure this in your test and live systems; please refer to section 3.17 of the System User Guide.
Are there any other considerations when going live?
For any configuration changes made to Rio TEST during release testing by your Rio team which you require or wish to have live, please ensure these are added into your local go-live plan.
Please be aware that there may be an increase in the size of the SQL transaction log as the upgrade will apply a significant number of SQL-scripted changes. It is not possible for Access to accurately predict the size of this increase as it is data dependent. Your reporting team should be made aware of this if you take a daily extract.
Some users may have to clear their local browser temporary files following an upgrade, to ensure the browser is using the latest files from the web server environment. The symptoms indicative of this action needing to be performed may be a plain white screen within the web browser, incorrect location of items on the Rio screen, or inability to see updated visual changes in the release. In this scenario, on an as-needed basis (only) we advise end users should remove temporary files (via the options/settings) of the web browser, restart the browser, log back into the application and try again. Please note that the behaviour of local browser cache on end-user PCs cannot be explicitly controlled by a server-side Rio installation. Notably, it’s been reported recently that this hasn’t been needed on Microsoft’s Edge browser however, the issue has arisen in Chrome and particularly with the use of APFM/Flow.
If your upgrade path requires client-side applications to be rolled out within your organisations’ IT systems e.g. Drop Zone for Rio or Flow: APFM Identity Agent (for whiteboards/elevating Flow access from ward users to privileged users), please ensure these are either already installed (if backwards compatible) or rolled-out in parallel, as applicable.
Where Access are responsible for your hosted environment, as a contingency we will capture point-in-time backups of your live system upon commencement of your live upgrade. This provides a temporary restore point in the unlikely event that roll-back would be required during or immediately after the release. These roll-back points can only be provided for a short duration after they were captured, as these could potentially cause a performance impact if they remain for an extended period. We ask for your final confirmation of acceptance of the release as soon as a significant number of users have logged on to the upgraded live system; this will then allow us to also upgrade your non-live systems to the same software level.
If your organisation utilises the NHS e-Referral Service (e-RS) functionality, please perform a manual poll after the upgrade (if applicable) before testing e-RS to avoid any potential issues occurring.
In the event of rollback scenario, our deployment team will prioritise the restoration of the core Rio application and services; any wider system implications due to the rollback will have their necessary solutions initiated proactively (i.e. any database re-seeds for data warehousing, effect on training baseline restores, etc.) although their respective solutions may need to ultimately be resolved from the following working day due to the timescales necessary to resolve. Should a rollback take place we’ll advise what these are expected to be.
Getting Help
How do I ask further questions?
For questions regarding delivery of your Monthly Release into your test or live environments, please do ask your allocated DevOps Coordinator who will be assigned to you soon after your MR request is agreed.
If you have questions related to the Rio application or documentation for example “how can I do this?” if these are not answered by the suite of documentation available in the knowledge or release notes areas of our Customer Success Portal, we kindly ask you to please raise any product queries in our Rio EPR community. This is to allow a member of our product team to review and respond as they will be best placed to answer product-related questions.
If you would specifically like to ask for a functionality change or enhancement to the product, we have a specific area to make suggestions - please use our Ideas portal to submit requests of this nature.
How do we report potential issues in testing?
Please log on to our Customer Success Portal and follow the steps in this video to select a project to raise a case; there is a corresponding case listed for the Rio release you’re testing. When selecting an impact, please only select an impact of either Critical or Major as an issue that would prevent your release acceptance or go-live. As with a support case, please provide all details including full replication steps, expected vs. actual outcome, and supporting screenshots/attachments.
We kindly ask you to consider if your organisation needs to triage your internal testing fault reports before sending to Access, and only submitting suspected application issues, to help us focus on investigating key problems. We kindly any Product-focused queries to instead be appropriately submitted to the Rio EPR Community forum.