Messages is the clinic’s secure inbox. Patients message the clinic from their portal; staff work the queue from the dashboard.
Navigate to Messages in the sidebar (/dashboard/messages).
The inbox
The inbox is two panes: threads on the left, the open thread on the right.
That shape is deliberate. A patient has two or three conversations and reads them one at a time; a clinic works a queue, and losing your place in it every time you answer something is what makes an inbox stop being worked.
The open thread lives in the URL. A thread is a link — pasteable to a colleague, and it survives a refresh mid-reply.
Unread counts are yours
The badge on the sidebar counts threads with something unread for you. Read state is per participant, so a colleague opening a reception thread does not clear your badge.
Starting a conversation
- Click New conversation
- Choose the patient
- Write the first message and send
Patients can also start a thread themselves from the portal, in which case it simply appears in the inbox.
What you can attach
| Attachment | What the patient sees |
|---|---|
| Files | A downloadable document or image |
| Invoices | The invoice, with a way to pay it — see Invoices |
| Forms | A link into the form, filled without a login |
| Instructions | A patient instruction to read |
Attaching an invoice to a thread is the fastest way to get a bill in front of someone who is already talking to you.
Reading a long inbox
Patient names on the thread list are fetched in batches as you scroll rather than all at once. A clinic with hundreds of threads sees the list render and sort immediately, with names filling in as you page down.
Privacy
Message content is patient health information and is treated as such — stored on Canadian infrastructure, encrypted at rest, and subject to the same redaction and access rules as the rest of the clinical record.
Analytics tooling on the dashboard masks message content, so nothing a patient wrote is captured in product telemetry.
Tips
- Answer from the thread rather than by email — the conversation stays on the patient’s record and any colleague picking it up sees the whole history.
- Attach the invoice instead of describing it. A payable link in the thread converts far better than “your balance is $180”.
- Copy the thread URL into an internal note when handing something over; it opens straight to the conversation.