Using Secure Messaging in TherapyNotes

Note: In order to send and receive client messages, the client portal must be enabled for your practice. To learn more, please see TherapyPortal: Your Custom Client Portal.

Secure Messaging allows clients and practices to better communicate with one another. Clients can send and receive messages through their TherapyPortal account. Client messages are organized by groups: Administrative, Billing, and Clinical. These groups set the permissions of who can view and respond to the message and create a structure to keep messages organized and HIPAA compliant. If you are a smaller practice with overlapping roles, you can keep this list as generic as possible. Clinicians can always see messages related to their assigned clients.

Administrative messages are visible to Practice Schedulers, Practice Admins, assigned Clinicians, Supervisors, and Clinical Admins.
Billing messages are visible to Practice Billers, assigned Clinicians, Supervisors, and Clinical Admins.
Clinical messages are visible to assigned Clinicians, Supervisors, and Clinical Admins.

Inbox Overview

To navigate to your inbox, click the Inbox icon in your top navigation menu.

When viewing the inbox, filtering allows you to narrow down the messages shown if you are looking for a specific message.

Use the first filter on the left to search for a specific client by typing the client's name in the field and selecting them in the drop-down. This filters the entire inbox to only messages with that client that you have access to.
The Audience filter allows users to filter their inbox to only see messages with that audience type selected. For example, if you are a clinician who does not handle any billing, you can filter your inbox to Clinical and not see the billing or admin messages that come in for your assigned client.
The Topics filter allows users to filter all messages down to a certain topic.
The last filter allows users to filter by message state- Read and Unread, Unread Only, All Including Archived, and Deleted messages.

Create a New Message

To create a new message, click the + New button on the top right.

You can type your client's name or select their name from the dropdown.
Select the audience.
Select a topic and the subject will populate automatically. You can edit the subject as well.
Type your message and click Send Message.

Tip: If your client does not have a portal account, you can still send a message. The message will invite the client to create their portal account first to view the message.

Responding to Messages

When a user receives a new message, the icon in header will display the number of new messages next to it. Clicking on the icon will bring the user back to their inbox to view the new message. New threads will have a dot indicator to the left of them and new messages inside a thread have the same dot indicator.

Hover over a message inside a thread to mark individual messages as read or unread and delete

Note: All users can delete messages that clients have not seen. If a message has been seen by a client, only Clinical Admins can delete Clinical messages and Practice Admins can delete Admin and Billing messages.
Once you type in the field to respond, the Send Message button will enable.
The checkbox to Mark as Read after sending message is auto-selected so any messages in the thread will be marked as read. Uncheck this before sending if you would like to keep the messages unread.
Archive, Delete, and Export at the bottom will do those actions at the thread level.

Deleting Messages

If a message has not been read by the TherapyPortal user, individual messages in a thread can be deleted by hovering over the messages. To delete an entire thread, you can click Delete on the lower, left hand side.

If the message has been read, only a user with the Practice Admin or Clinical Admin role can delete it.

Editing a Thread Header

When viewing a thread, use the button edit button to edit the thread header. Once this is open, the user can edit the audience, topic, and subject. When changing audiences, there were be a confirmation message that displays the change in message viewing. For example, if a message was a billing message but is changed to an admin message, billers will no longer have access to the message and admins will now have access to it.

Setting Up Email Notifications

TherapyNotes users are able to receive an email notification when they receive a new message. To manage notifications:

Click Staff > Staff Name > Notifications tab.
Check the boxes for the notification type.
Click Save Changes.

Note: Users will receive an email notification for every new message thread. If a client sends multiple messages in a thread, the user will receive only one email for the thread until they review the new message.