Quick Reference — To reply to an open patient case

athenaCollector

 

When your patients send messages to providers using the Patient Portal, these messages appear in the Clinical Inbox as patient cases. You can reply to messages sent by patients from the Patient Portal by opening the patient case.

Note: Patients can attach files to the messages they send from the Patient Portal. In addition, practice users can attach files to patient cases when sending or replying to Patient Portal messages, allowing your practice to send clinical information such as orders, results, medications, letters, and more. For more information about patients' attachments, see To view secure message attachments sent by patients from the Patient Portal.

  1. In the Clinical Inbox, click the linked number in the Patient Cases column.
    Note: Patient messages sent using the Patient Portal are in the PORTAL inbox row.
  2. Click the patient case to open it in update mode.
  3. If you are responding to a patient or caregiver message sent using the Patient Portal:
    1. Click VIEW ACTIONS at the bottom of the page.
    2. Select Reply to Patient via Portal.
      Note: Leave the Source/Recipient field set to Patient Portal to ensure that your response is sent to the patient or caregiver as a message on the Patient Portal.
    3. Enter the text of your response in the Action Note field. This text is the message that the patient or caregiver will see on the Patient Portal. To use a text macro in the Action Note field, type a period (".") followed by the beginning, or any part of, the shortcut name, then select the macro you need from the search results.
      Note: If you're responding to a patient question related to symptom management, a HIPAA-compliant AI model generates up to five brief response suggestions based on the details provided by the patient in the Case Description. You can select one or more draft responses to automatically populate the Action Note field. For more details, see Patient Case.
  4. If you are responding to a message that was not sent from the Patient Portal (the Source/Recipient field is not set to Patient Portal):
    1. Click VIEW ACTIONS at the bottom of the page.
    2. Select Reply to Sender.
    3. Enter the text of your response in the Action Note field. To use a text macro in the Action Note field, type a period (".") followed by the beginning, or any part of, the shortcut name, then select the macro you need from the search results.

  5. To add attachments to the patient case, click the add attachments icon and select the documents to attach to the case in the selection window. All attachments will be merged into a single PDF file, which is then assigned a unique document ID.

  6. Click the Save button.
    The case is assigned to the user who performed the last action on the case.