You may have noticed when creating segments, or setting up triggers that you cannot filter/target by age or by year of birth.
The marketing list does contain the date of birth (so you can send happy birthday emails), but the year of birth is set to a default value of 1970 - this is just an arbitrary year.
Why is it like this?
When we designed Peptalkr, we consulted with Cliniko on security best practices. Cliniko strongly recommended we do not store the 'year of birth' of patients - as this is potentially sensitive identifying information about a patient.
As such, the marketing list does not contain the year of birth, and so age-based segmentation is not currently possible.
The same applies to triggers and SMS - there is no age/date of birth filter for the same reason.
Is there a workaround?
The only workaround for the timebeing is to do an export of patients from Cliniko, and manually import them into a Custom List for whatever email you're trying to send.
However, this workaround is only suitable for one off campaigns - we don't recommend using it for any automated journeys as custom lists do not automatically sync with Cliniko, it'll just be a static list.
Furthermore, when you manually import contacts - it counts against your total subscriber count and thus may increase the price of your plan. Hence we suggest deleting the custom list after you send your campaign so you only pay a higher plan price for one month.
We are working on a solution to this - namely adding a new field for 'Age range' and placing patients into an age bracket without storing their actual year of birth. It is not scheduled just yet (as at April 2024), but it is planned for sometime this year.