Inbox & messaging — voicemail

Find the messages callers left you

When someone calls the practice and nobody picks up, the call goes to a voicemail box and the caller leaves a message. Those messages arrive in the Inbox, in the Patient view, in among the patient threads — so a message left on the phone gets worked the same way a portal message or a text does: read it, deal with it, mark it done.

There is no separate folder to remember to check. A voicemail is a row in the same list as the portal, text and email threads, placed by the time it came in and marked with a voicemail glyph so you can tell it apart at a glance. The unread count beside Patient includes voicemail, and so does the Messages tile on the Home dashboard. Voicemail rows appear only for practices using Soaper Phone; if your practice answers its phones another way, you won’t see any (see Before it works).

1. Open the Inbox. The Patient view is where you land, and it is where voicemail lands too. The list, the reading pane, and the action bar work exactly like the rest of the Inbox — the same three columns described in the Inbox tour.
2. Read the unread pill. The number beside Patient counts the threads and the voicemails you haven’t opened yet. It refreshes on its own, and it drops the moment you open one.
3. Or use the phone dock instead — it’s the same list. The softphone dock (Ctrl+P) has a bell with the same messages behind it. It is one list with one read state: open a message here and the dock’s badge goes down; play it from the dock and it stops being bold here.

Scan the list and find the one you want

Each voicemail is one row, sitting wherever its time puts it among the threads — a message left at 9:40 appears between the threads that came in just before and just after it. Read left to right, a row tells you who called, from what number, how long they talked, and — when the box transcribes — roughly what they said, without opening anything.

1. Search when the list is long. The magnifier searches the threads and the voicemail together. For a voicemail it matches the caller’s name, the phone number, the voicemail box the message landed in, and the whole transcript — so “refill” or “reschedule” finds the messages about refills or rescheduling, and a partial phone number finds a specific caller.
2. Sort the way you work. Most Recent for the newest first, or Unread First to push everything you haven’t read or heard to the top — unread voicemails sit up there with the unread threads. Under Flagged First the voicemail rows follow the flagged threads, because a voicemail can’t be flagged.
3. Open one. Clicking a row opens it in the reading pane and marks it read.

Matched callers, unknown callers, and the ones in between

Hero EMR looks the caller’s number up against your charts, and it is deliberately conservative about the answer. If exactly one chart carries that number, the message shows that patient’s name and the name links straight to their chart. Anything else — no chart, or more than one — shows Unknown.

The detail pane spells the match out under Caller: either “Maria Garcia (matched by phone number)” or “Unknown — no chart matches this number”. The wording is doing real work — it’s telling you exactly how much Hero EMR knows.

Play the message, read the transcript, return the call

Open a message and everything you need sits in one pane: who called and when, a player, the transcript, and the details.

1. Play it. A standard audio player sits at the top of the pane — play, pause, scrub, volume. It reads Loading message… for a moment while the recording is fetched. Switching to another message resets the player, so you never half-hear one message over another.
2. Read it instead. Under Transcription is the message typed out, if the box has transcription turned on. It’s faster to skim than to listen to, and it’s searchable from the list. Boxes without transcription show No transcription available. — play the recording.
3. Call them back. Call back at the top right dials the caller’s number in your softphone, with the call already tied to the matched chart. If you don’t use the softphone, the number is shown as plain text to dial yourself.
4. Check the details. The bottom of the pane lists Voicemail box (which box the caller reached — useful when your practice runs separate boxes for billing, refills, or a specific provider), Caller, Number, Length, and Received.

Read, unread, and done

Voicemail uses the Inbox’s ordinary triage tools (Triage tools), with one thing worth knowing: read state is shared with the phone dock, so there is only ever one truth about what you’ve heard.

1. Opening a message marks it read. The row loses its bold and its dot, the Patient count drops, and the dock’s bell badge drops with it.
2. Put one back if you’re not done. Mark as unread (Ctrl+U) returns it to the queue — and to the dock’s badge — so a message you listened to but can’t action yet doesn’t quietly disappear.
3. Mark it complete when the callback is made. Backspace, or the check in the action bar, hides the message from the list. The clock button toggles Show completed messages to bring completed ones back, grayed out.

What has to be switched on — and what to check when nothing arrives

Three things decide whether you see voicemail, and all three are admin settings rather than personal ones.