Message your team
Start a conversation, send a message and attach a file. Messages reaches colleagues in the practice you are working in, and nobody else.
Messages is your practice talking to itself. You can reach colleagues in the practice you're working in, and nobody else.
Note
Patients can't message you here, and you can't message them. A conversation needs two people in the same practice, so anything patient-facing gets sent by appointment reminders or however your practice normally reaches them.
Start a conversation
New conversation asks for a name. Type a colleague's name or role, pick them from the matches, and Start conversation opens the thread. It searches the practice you're working in, so anyone it finds is someone you can write to.
You're both in the same practice by definition. Switch to another practice and you get that practice's conversations instead.
Note
Messages is in the sidebar for a practitioner profile. A practice support profile doesn't carry it.
Send a message
Type and send. A message reads Sending… while it's in flight and swaps to the time it arrived once it's through. One that didn't leave says Failed to send, with the reason and a button to try again.
A message takes 10,000 characters. The composer starts counting down at the last 500.
Your colleague sees when you're typing, and the unread count on Messages in the sidebar tells them something is waiting.
Attach a file
Attach file takes a file up to 10MB. PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, CSVs, plain text and zip files, and images as PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP or AVIF.
Anything else comes back with That file type cannot be attached. Send a PDF, image, document or spreadsheet. SVG is refused on purpose, because an SVG can carry script.
Everything shared in a thread also collects under Shared files beside it, split into Images and Documents, so a document from three weeks ago doesn't need scrolling back to.
Warning
A message thread is not a clinical record. Anything that belongs in a patient's history belongs on their encounter, where it's kept, audited and visible to whoever treats them next.
Find an old message
Search messages at the top of the conversation list looks inside the messages themselves, so a half-remembered phrase finds the thread. It reads No messages match when nothing does.