Inbox & messaging

Open the Inbox and tour the views

The Inbox is your unified work queue for everything that arrives at the practice — patient messages, lab and imaging results, prescription requests, completed paperwork, referrals, faxes, website inquiries, and billing exceptions. It lives in its own always-open tab beside Home and Calendar, and the dashboard queue buttons (Dashboard queues) deep-link straight into the right view. Inside, work is sorted into views:

1. Open the Inbox tab. Inbox sits beside Home and Calendar at the top of the workspace. Like those two, it’s a system tab — it can’t be closed, so your queue is always one click away.
2. Know the three columns. A collapsible view sidebar on the left lists the views, each with its own unread-count pill. Next to it, a narrow message list carries the action bar on top and a blue New Message button pinned at the bottom. The reading pane fills the rest of the screen.
3. Collapse the sidebar when you want room. The chevron button (Collapse sidebar / Expand sidebar) shrinks the views to icon badges; large counts cap at 99+.
4. Pick up where you left off. Each view remembers your selected message, search text, and scroll position when you navigate away and back, so flipping to a chart mid-triage doesn’t cost you your place.

Which views you see depends on your role: physicians get every view except Billing, practice admins see all nine, and staff see the views their messaging, document, and billing permissions unlock — staff with no inbox permissions don’t get the Inbox tab at all (see Staff accounts & permissions).

Work from the dashboard queues

You don’t have to start in the Inbox itself. The Home dashboard groups your inbox work into three labeled button groups, each header showing an N total rollup. Every button carries a live count and deep-links into the matching Inbox view, so the dashboard doubles as your morning triage board.

The unread badges — on these buttons and on the Inbox sidebar — refresh automatically about every minute, and opening or triaging an item updates them immediately. How loudly Hero EMR notifies you about new messages is tunable per physician — urgency thresholds and after-hours rules live in Message Settings.

Read and answer patient threads

The Patient view shows one row per conversation, and every inbound channel funnels into it: portal secure messages, texted-in SMS (subjects prefixed [SMS]), mail to the practice email address ([Email]), and the AI phone agent — verified callers can leave messages that arrive with a [Phone] prefix, and calls the agent can’t handle escalate as Phone Agent Escalation messages with the caller, the reason, and call context attached.

1. Scan the list.
   • A blue dot (tooltip Unread) and bold sender/subject mark unread threads.
   • Colored corner dots flag urgency — yellow for Medium, red for High.
   • A green check marks threads you’ve responded to; a gray check marks Completed ones.
2. Open a thread. Selecting a row opens a split reading pane under a patient info bar, and marks the thread read automatically (use Mark as unread to put it back in the queue — see Triage tools). The toolbar offers Chart Review (jump to the chart), Schedule (the appointment modal, pre-loaded with the patient), New Order (Ctrl+O — see standalone orders), and Forward.
3. Use the clinical context. The left half shows the linked encounter: collapsible Diagnoses, Orders, and Follow-up panels — the same tools you use during encounter completion, embedded right in the message — plus the Encounter Note card with the Chief Complaint and full note. Messages without an encounter show No encounter linked to this message.
4. Reply in the thread. The right half shows Message History — your messages in green, the patient’s in gray, forwarding events as pills — with the Your Response to Patient box at the bottom. Enter sends, Shift+Enter adds a line, or click Send to Patient. While sending, the bubble shows Sending…; a failure shows Failed with Retry and Dismiss. Drafts auto-save per thread for your session, so switching threads never loses a half-written reply. Attachments render inline under Attachments (n), and replies support inline images and dot phrases.

Let Hero AI draft the reply

Next to Your Response to Patient sits a purple wand button (Generate AI responses). One click asks Hero AI to read the full conversation and draft up to three replies — you preview, pick, edit, and stay in control of what actually goes to the patient.

1. Click the wand. The button shows Generating responses…, then the drafts appear in an AI Suggested Responses overlay and as Response 1/2/3 chips above the compose box. If nothing useful comes back you’ll see No AI suggestions available.
2. Preview, pick, and edit. Hover a chip to read the full draft with the AI’s rationale; click it to insert the text into your reply for editing (the selected chip shows a check mark). Suggestions are stored per thread, so they survive navigating away and back.
3. Steer the drafts. The optional instruction box — Optional: Tell AI how to respond (e.g. “reassure, schedule follow-up in 3 months”) — shapes the tone and content before you generate.
4. Extract orders from your sent replies. On your own sent messages, a small wand (Extract orders) reads the text and turns commitments — “I’ll order a CBC” — into draft orders in the Orders panel. Disabled states explain themselves: Wait for the message to send before extracting orders, Only sent messages can be extracted.

Triage with flags, read state & completion

Every view shares the same triage toolkit: read state, flags, completion, sorting, and search. The quickest path is the right-click menu on any list row; the same actions live in the action bar above the list (as icon buttons on very wide screens, otherwise behind a … overflow menu).

1. Right-click any row. The context menu offers Open, Mark as read / Mark as unread, Flag / Remove flag, Forward thread… (patient threads only), and Mark as complete / Mark as incomplete. The action-bar equivalents are Mark as complete, Flag message, and Mark as unread.
2. Sort the list. The sort dropdown offers Most Recent, Unread First, and Flagged First. Sort buckets stay stable until you refresh or change the sort, so items don’t jump around while you work through them.
3. Search and filter. The magnifier (Search / Filters) opens a panel with Search text (placeholder Subject, sender, body…), Received within chips (24h / 7d / 1mo / All), and a Patient filter (Choose… opens patient search; Any patient when unset), plus Clear filters and Done. While filters are active, the magnifier becomes a one-click Clear filters.
4. Complete finished work. Completing an item hides it from the list. The clock button toggles Show completed messages / Hide completed messages to reveal them grayed out with a Completed check. For patient threads, completing covers the whole conversation — and the thread automatically returns to your list if the patient sends a newer message.
5. Refresh without losing your place. Refresh messages re-pulls the current view while keeping your selection.

Forward a conversation to your team

Forwarding is how patient conversations are handed to another physician or staff member — the message stays one thread, but ownership of the work moves to the recipient’s queue with the full prior history attached.

1. Open the dialog. Click the Forward toolbar button on a patient thread, or right-click the row and choose Forward thread….
2. Pick the recipient. The Forward Conversation dialog lists your organization’s clinicians and staff with a Search team members… box — physicians show a stethoscope icon with credentials, staff show their title. Star a physician (Add to favorites / Remove from favorites) to pin them under a Favorites header above All Team Members; it’s the same favorites list the calendar uses. Only physicians can be starred.
3. Send it. Select the person and click Forward (it reads Forwarding… while in flight); Cancel closes without forwarding.
4. What the recipient sees. The conversation appears in their own Patient view with a blue forward arrow (tooltip This conversation has been forwarded to you), and the thread timeline records an event pill — Dr. A forwarded to Dr. B.

Compose new messages & tune your messaging rules

To start a conversation rather than answer one, use the blue New Message button pinned at the bottom of the message-list column. A new message opens a fresh secure thread; the patient is alerted by push/SMS/email and replies from the portal, which lands right back in your Patient view.

1. Click New Message. The compose modal opens (the same modal titles itself Reply to Message or Forward Message in those contexts).
2. Pick the patient. To: is a patient picker — type two or more characters in Search for a patient…, or choose from RECENT PATIENTS (shown with DOB and MRN). Patients without a portal account are grayed out with a No account tag; selecting one shows an error that they cannot receive messages.
3. Write and send. Fill Subject: and Message: (inline images and dot phrases are supported), then click Send Message — it shows Sending…, then Message Sent with a Message sent successfully! banner before the modal closes.
4. Replies stay in the conversation. Replying from a thread reuses the conversation, prefixes the subject with Re:, and locks the recipient to the patient on the thread.

Your personal messaging rules live under the toolbar Settings menu > Message Settings (the modal is titled Message Preferences):