User Guide — Clinical Inbox

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The Clinical Inbox provides access to clinical tasks and documents that await action by physicians, administrative staff members, or athenahealth staff.

Note: In April 2026, athenahealth updated and enhanced this user guide to improve clarity and usability.

Access the Clinical Inbox

Inbox Categories

The Clinical Inbox organizes your clinical tasks and documents into several key categories to help you efficiently manage your workload. These categories are consistent across both the list view and grid view of the Clinical Inbox.

Category	Description
Admin/Phone Messages	Administrative documents and phone message tasks that need processing or follow-up.
Appointment Requests	Appointment requests sent to the practice, often originating from patient portals or administrative staff.
Encounters	Patient encounters assigned to you or users you follow. It shows patients currently checked in or with upcoming visits. Green bars indicate patient check-in status and readiness for the provider.
Lab/Imaging	Lab and imaging results that need review or reconciliation. Abnormal or high-priority results are highlighted with a red badge to draw attention. In the list view, a boxed number in red indicates the number of lab/imaging results that came back as abnormal and are considered higher priority for review. High priority items are marked as abnormal. If a lab order is associated with several received lab results, the number of associated results is indicated under the patient's name in the worklist.
Need Followup	Tasks flagged as requiring additional follow-up actions or monitoring.
Orders/Rxs/Auths	All orders, prescriptions, and authorizations requiring your attention. This category covers medication orders, lab orders, imaging orders, and prior authorization requests. The colors indicate the appointment status and are sorted in order of priority by default.
Patient Cases	Patient cases that require follow-up or action, such as clinical issues or patient inquiries routed to the Clinical Inbox.
Patient in Office	Tasks related to patients currently in the office.
Total	A comprehensive worklist showing all tasks assigned to you or your configured users, aggregating all categories.
Urgent Tasks	Displays tasks marked as urgent due to clinical priority, such as STAT orders or flagged documents needing immediate attention. A task is flagged as urgent under these circumstances: In a clinical document, result, or correspondence, the This task is urgent option was selected. An order was marked as STAT during the order workflow. An encounter contains an order that was marked as STAT, causing the encounter itself to be marked as Urgent. Note: The encounter remains "Urgent" until it is closed, even if the order marked as STAT has been submitted.
Unknown Documents	Documents that cannot be classified into other categories, often requiring review or reclassification.
Unconfigured User	All tasks assigned to users in your practice who are not yet configured as a row in any user's Clinical Inbox. If a document or encounter is assigned to a username that does not appear as a row in any Clinical Inbox in your practice, the task appears in a row labeled Unconfigured User in your Clinical Inbox. athenaOne also moves documents assigned to users without permissions to access the Clinical Inbox (and users whose access has expired) to the Unconfigured User row in the Inbox. Note: athenaOne runs a script hourly that searches for documents assigned to users without access to the Clinical Inbox and moves them into the Unconfigured User row. Another athenaOne script runs nightly to clear everything out of that row. The row is then repopulated the next time that the hourly script runs. This means that documents are automatically moved into the row once an hour, but only moved out once a day.

List View

The Clinical Inbox has two views: the list view and the grid view. The list view appears in the left pane of your clinician home page in athenaOne and presents your clinical tasks and documents as a vertical list.

Inbox configuration

You can configure the list view of your Clinical Inbox without affecting the grid view. This allows you to focus only on tasks assigned to you, or to monitor the tasks of other selected users.

To add tasks or users, click at the top of the Inbox. You can click Users (n), Provider/Department Staff (n), or Practice Roles (n) and scroll through the list, or you can use the search tool. This list includes users in all the departments configured in the grid view of the Clinical Inbox, as well as any selected departments. Uppercase indicates roles configured in your current and selected departments. Select or deselect users to follow or unfollow these users.

Configure the inbox across multiple departments

By default, if you work in multiple departments, you can view tasks across departments for the users you configured to view in your Inbox, regardless of the department you selected when you logged in to athenaOne. If you have not previously configured any users, your Inbox shows only your tasks, across departments. When you access the Clinical Inbox, athenaOne verifies your current department access and displays only those departments that you're authorized to view since your last login.

Note: Your organization must have the Department Login Permissions feature.

Display the athenaOne home page: On the Main Menu, click the athenaOne logo.
From the Inbox menu, select List View.
Click at the top right of the Inbox. A list of all departments appears on the left, and a list of users and roles appears on the right.
Select at least one department on the left to refine the list of users and roles that appears on the right.
Note: Refining the list by department is not equivalent to displaying tasks assigned to all users and roles in the Inbox. After you select a department, you still need to select an item under Users and roles before tasks appear in your inbox.
Select the users or roles of interest on the right, under Users and roles.
Tip: You can search for a specific user by entering the user's full name or username in the search field and then selecting the full name in the list of search results. Or, you can browse for users by expanding the Users or Practice Roles category, scrolling through the list, and selecting a user or role.

Grid View

The Clinical Inbox has two views: the list view and the grid view. The grid view provides a matrix-style layout that organizes clinical tasks by users, roles, and departments. This view is designed to help managers, team leads, or clinicians overseeing multiple users monitor and manage tasks across a group rather than focusing on an individual task list.

Inbox configuration

Select departments to display in the grid view

In the grid view of the Clinical Inbox, you can select the users, roles, and departments whose tasks you want to see.

Note: To select departments, your organization must have the Department Login Permissions feature. If you have access to only one department, see Select users and roles to display in the grid view.

From the Inbox menu, select Clinical Inbox to display the grid view.
At the upper right corner of the grid view, click to display the department and user selections. The USER AND ROLES selector displays a list of departments and a list of users.
To see only tasks for the users and roles in your department of login, select Limit inbox to log in department option.
To configure the departments that appear, hover over Departments to display the SELECT ALL and CLEAR ALL options. The list of selected departments determines which users and roles appear on the right side of the window.

Note: If you have never selected any departments, you see only the SELECT ALL option; if all departments are selected, you see only the CLEAR ALL option.
Select and remove departments. You can also use the Department search box to find and select departments.
You can select user and role tasks for the departments you select. See Select users and roles to display in the grid view.

Select users and roles to display in the grid view

From the Inbox menu, select Clinical Inbox to display the grid view.
At the upper right corner of the grid view, click to display the USER AND ROLES selector.
Note: If you have access to more than one department, you also see the department selector.
To configure the users and roles that appear in the Clinical Inbox, hover the cursor over Users to display SELECT ALL and CLEAR ALL. You can also hover over Staff, Practice Roles, and athenahealth to select or clear all items.
Note: If you have never selected any users, you see only the SELECT ALL option; if all users are selected, you see only the CLEAR ALL option.
Select and remove users. You can also use the Users and roles search box to find and select users and roles.

Configure fields in worklists

You can choose which fields appear for worklists in Clinical Inbox categories and change the order in which those fields are listed. The configuration you choose applies to all worklists in the same inbox category. Additionally, each user at your practice can have their own set of configurations, and those configurations don't impact one another. For a list of available worklist fields, see the Field Reference table.

From the Inbox menu, select Clinical Inbox to display the grid view of the Clinical Inbox.
Click a linked number in a row/column intersect to display the list of tasks in that category.
Click Configure Fields.
To display or hide a field, turn the toggle on or off. To rearrange the order of fields, drag and drop a field into a new position in the list.

Your changes apply automatically. To reset to the default configuration, click Default.

Find Tasks and Documents

Search for a specific document

You can search for documents in the Clinical Inbox, documents that were deleted, and documents assigned to a patient chart that are not listed in the inbox. Use the filter fields on the Document Search page to help you locate the documents that you need.

Tip: If you do not filter the document search by date (using the Created between field) or by document class (using the Document Class field), the search could take several minutes to run, particularly at large practices, and the results may not be specific enough.

Display the Document Search page: On the Main Menu, click Patients. Under DOCUMENTS, click Document Search.
Document ID — Enter the document ID number, if known.
Created between — Enter a date range for the document, if known.
Patient ID — Enter the patient ID associated with the document, if known, or enter the first few letters of the patient's name and select the name from the matching list.
Clinical Provider — Enter the first few characters of the provider's name, then select the clinical provider from the matching list.
Document Class — Select the document class.
Document Subclass — If you selected a document class, you can also select a document subclass (depending on the document class you selected).
Document Status — Select the document status.
Document Source — Select the source of the document.
Clinical Order Type — Enter the first few characters of the order type, then select it from the matching list.
Created By — Enter the first few letters of the first name, last name, or username of the athenaOne user who created the documents you are searching for and select the user from the matching list.
Note: You cannot search by credential, position, specialty, or provider group. If the letters you entered result in more than 200 matches, a message instructs you to enter more characters. For more information, see Searching for documents created by a specific user.
Click Search. The document search results appear.
You can click a column header to sort the list by that column.

Manage Inbox Tasks

Quick actions

You can take actions on inbox items directly from the Clinical Inbox via the Quick Action Menu, accessible from the grid view of the Clinical Inbox.

Take the following steps to access the Quick Action Menu:

From the Inbox menu, select Clinical Inbox to display the grid view of the Clinical Inbox.
Click a linked number in a row/column intersect to display the list of tasks in that category.
To display the Quick Action Menu, right-click the inbox item or hover over the item and click the more options icon .
Select an option from the menu and complete the fields in the pop-up window.
Click Save. When you select Reassign, Add Action Note, or Close, you can click Save to complete the action or click the down arrow to save and complete an additional action:
- Save & Create Order — Completes the quick action and navigates you to the Order Group page.
- Save & Schedule Appointment — Completes the quick action and navigates you to the Schedule Appointment page.

The following table describes the quick actions available for items in the Clinical Inbox. Available actions vary by document type.

Action	Description
Add Action Note	Add an action note to the document. Note: Click Save to complete the action, or click the down arrow to also create an order or schedule an appointment.
Add Orders	Navigates you to the Order Group page.
Close	Select a reason for closing the document (when applicable), add an action note, and close the document. Note: Click Save to complete the action, or click the down arrow to also create an order or schedule an appointment.
Complete Review	When you click Complete Review, you can select one of two options to complete your review: Share with patient — Selecting this option publishes the results to the Patient Portal and updates the status of the result document to SUBMIT. If the notification method is not set for the patient, or the patient doesn't have Patient Portal access, selecting this option closes the result document. Discussed with patient — Selecting this option closes the result document. If you select both Share with patient and Discussed with patient, Share with patient takes precedence. When you click Complete Review, an error message appears if the result document is missing provider information, missing a document label, or marked as "Risk of patient harm or legal violation—do not send to patient." This is one example of this error message:
Delete	Select a reason for deleting the document (when applicable), add an action note, and delete the document. This action is available only when Delete is an option on the document view. You must have deletion permissions (the Clinicals: Delete Document permission or Clinicals Deletion role) to delete a document.
Go to Quickview	Navigates you to the patient's Quickview page.
Mark Notification Completed	For the following documents in NOTIFY status, you can click Mark Notification Completed to close the document: Clinical documents Patient Care Summary letters Patient correspondence
Reassign	Reassign the patient case to another user and add an action note. Note: Click Save to complete the action, or click the down arrow to also create an order or schedule an appointment.
Reply to Patient via Portal (or Reply to Sender)	Patient cases only. Select to ensure your response is sent to the patient as a message on the Patient Portal.
Report Failed Contact Attempt	Report an unsuccessful attempt to contact the patient about the case.
Schedule Appointment	Navigates you to the Schedule Appointment page.
Snooze	Patient cases only. Snooze a patient case to remove the case temporarily from the Clinical Inbox and return to it later. For more details, see Snooze patient cases and To snooze a patient case from the Clinical Inbox.

Note: If the patient is unknown, some quick actions (Go to Quickview, Add Orders, and Schedule Appointment) are not available.

The following table lists the available actions for each inbox category.

Inbox category	Quick actions
Encounters	Go to Quickview
Appointment Requests	Reassign Add Action Note Go to Quickview Add Orders Schedule Appointment Close Delete
Patient Cases	Reassign Add Action Note Snooze Reply to Patient via Portal (or Reply to Sender) Report Failed Contact Attempt Close Go to Quickview Add Orders Schedule Appointment Delete
Order/Rxs/Auths	Reassign Add Action Note Go to Quickview Add Orders Schedule Appointment Delete
Lab/Imaging	Reassign Add Action Note Complete Review Close Go to Quickview Add Orders Schedule Appointment Delete Note: Complete Review and Close apply only to interface and Marketplace Partner API lab results and are available only if the lab result document is in REVIEW status.
Clinical Documents	Reassign Add Action Note Go to Quickview Add Orders Schedule Appointment Delete
Admin/Phone Messages	Reassign Add Action Note Close Go to Quickview Add Orders Schedule Appointment Delete
Unknown Documents	Reassign Add Action Note Go to Quickview Add Orders Schedule Appointment Delete
Need Followup	Reassign Add Action Note Go to Quickview Add Orders Schedule Appointment Delete
Total	Reassign Add Action Note Close Go to Quickview Add Orders Schedule Appointment Delete
Patient in Office	Reassign Add Action Note Close Go to Quickview Add Orders Schedule Appointment Delete
Urgent	Reassign Add Action Note Go to Quickview Add Orders Schedule Appointment Delete

Quick overview

You can expand specific items in the Clinical Inbox to see relevant details via the Quick Overview. Currently, this functionality is available only for patient cases and lab results.

Take the following steps to access the Quick Overview:

From the Inbox menu, select Clinical Inbox to display the grid view of the Clinical Inbox.
Click a linked number in a row/column intersect to display the list of tasks in that category.
Hover over a task and click the down arrow .

Patient cases

For patient cases, the Quick Overview displays the case description and action note history.

Lab results

For interface and Marketplace Partner API lab results, the Quick Overview displays the following result details:

Result details — Result name, result status, performed date, publish status, and portal access.
Analyte data — Analyte, current value, reference range, units, abnormal flag, and status.
Result note.

For consolidated result tasks with multiple results, the Quick Overview includes a tab for each result. Click a tab to view details for that result:

Depending on your screen size, the Quick Overview may display a menu listing each result in the consolidated result task, rather than separate tabs. Select a result to view the details:

Note: You can still click the result task to navigate to the result document or open the consolidated document view.

Task Processing and Organization

Field Reference

You can customize which fields appear for worklists in Clinical Inbox categories. Some fields may not be enabled to display by default. Not all fields are available for all inbox categories.

Worklist Fields for Clinical Inbox Categories — Grid View
Patient	Patient demographic information.
Status	Status of the task or document.
Description	Description of the task or document.
Patient Status	Patient check-in status and location.
Related Facility	Provider listed on the document, or the provider the document was sent from or is to be submitted to. For Patient Cases, this field displays the outside provider, lab, or pharmacy listed on the patient case.
Department	Department associated with the task or document.
Preferred Provider	Provider listed on the document.
Provider	Provider listed on the patient case or the preferred provider listed on the appointment request. This field appears only in the worklist for Patient Cases.
Provider/Location	Depending on the Clinical Inbox category, this field displays the following information: Patient status Patient location Sending or receiving providers
Usual Provider	The patient's usual provider as seen in the patient's Quickview.
Rendering Provider	Provider from encounter review documents. This field appears only in the worklist for Clinical Documents.
Ordering Provider	Name of the ordering provider listed on the order document. This field appears only in worklists for Orders/Rxs/Auths and Need Followup.
Primary Insurance	The patient's primary payer as seen in the patient's Quickview.
Case Policy	The patient's first listed case policy as seen in the patient's Quickview.
Perform Date	Date the order was performed as listed on the order. This field appears only in worklists for Orders/Rxs/Auths, Need Followup , Total, and Urgent.
Date of Service	Date the order will be performed. This applies to surgery, procedure, imaging, and consult orders. This field appears only in worklists for Orders/Rxs/Auths, Need Followup , Total, and Urgent.
Encounter Date	Date the encounter is scheduled to occur. This field appears only in worklists for Orders/Rxs/Auths, Need Followup , Total, and Urgent.
Created	Date the task or document was created.
Last Updated	Date and time the task was last modified. Hover over the date to see the most recent action taken on the task.
Source	Source of the task or document.
Time In Inbox	How long an item has been available in the Clinical Inbox. This field indicates when an item entered the inbox and isn't necessarily consistent with when the item was created. If a status change removes an item the Clinical Inbox (for example, a document is submitted, closed, or deleted), and that item later returns to the Clinical Inbox, the Time In Inbox value resets. Reassigning an item doesn't reset the Time In Inbox value. Note: Between 2023 and 2024, athenahealth rebuilt the Clinical Inbox for organizations using athenaOne. As a result, depending on when the Clinical Inbox was rebuilt for your organization, 2023 or 2024 is considered to be the earliest year that an item could have entered the inbox. Items received after your organization's inbox rebuild date reflect an accurate Time In Inbox age.