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.
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Clinical messages are visible to assigned Clinicians, Supervisors, and Clinical Admins.
Inbox Overview
To navigate to your inbox, click Messages in the left side menu.
When viewing the inbox, filtering allows you to narrow down the messages shown if you are looking for a specific message.
(1) Using the left-side panel, toggle between your Patient Messages inbox and Internal (practice) Messages inbox. Deleted messages can be accessed here as well.
(2) The audience types allow users to filter their patient 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.
(3) These filters allow users to filter by message state including Unread Only, Unread and Read, and All Including Archived.
- If you are a Clinician with additional TherapyNotes roles, you can filter your patient inbox to My Patients Only from here as well.
(4) The Topics filter allows users to filter all messages down to a certain topic.
(5) The top search bar allows users to search for a specific client, staff, or staff group by typing the name in the field and selecting them in the drop-down. This filters the entire inbox to only those applicable messages or clients that you have access to.
Create a New Message
- To create a new message, click the + New Conversation 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.
Responding to Messages
When a user receives a new message, the Messages icon will display a dot indicator next to it. Clicking on the icon will bring the user back to their inbox to view the new message. New conversations will display the number of new messages to the right of them and new messages inside a conversation have the same dot indicator.
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Hover over a message inside a conversation 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.
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Archive and Delete at the bottom and Export at the top will do those actions at the conversation level.
Read Messages
When a sent message has been read by a TherapyPortal user, a blue checkmark icon will appear to indicate it was read by them. To reveal the date and time the message was read, hover over the blue checkmark icon.
Deleting Messages
If a message has not been read by the TherapyPortal user, individual messages in a conversation can be deleted by hovering over the messages. To delete an entire conversation, you can click Delete on the lower, right side.
If the message has been read, only a user with the Practice Admin or Clinical Admin role can delete it.
Editing a Conversation Header
When viewing a conversation, use the Edit pencil icon to edit the conversation header. Once this is open, the user can edit the audience, topic, and subject. When changing audiences, there will 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.