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Collaborate on tasks

One of the reasons you may use collaborations to send messages to your colleagues is to ask them to do something.

You can take your request one step further by sending a task instead. It's just like a collaboration, but you can include a due date for your request, and your colleague can update the status of the request to in-progress or complete.

Tasks can be helpful in scenarios like:

  • Asking a colleague to call a patient and confirm their next appointment.
  • Reminding a student that they need to update their treatment note with more detail by the end of the week.
  • Tracking the date for when your supervisor wants the monthly clinical report summary on their desk.

Through this activity you'll be able to:

  • Create a task to request that your colleague does something for you.
  • Check the status of the task so you know when the work is done.
  • Send a follow-up message about your task request.

⏱ The activities should take 3 to 10 minutes to complete.

📣 Before you start make sure you have:

  • A username and password to an ICE Health Systems environment.
  • Optional: an activity handout PDF to keep track of your progress, focus on the activities, and record questions or interesting points for future reference.

📖 Key terms introduced or important in the training.

  • Collaboration An instant messaging conversation inside of ICE between one or more people.
  • Task An instant messaging conversation used to request and track work. Similar to a Collaboration but with due date, and in-progress or complete status options.

💡 Support materials if you have questions or want to know more as you're exploring.

Manage your tasks​

For many people, task management looks like sticky notes at their desk and repetitive emails to people asking for updates.

When you create tasks inside of ICE, you can quickly check the progress of any tasks for yourself or others, mark your own work as complete, and send quick follow-ups, all without getting distracted outside of the system and reducing the number of emails pulling attention away from actually completing the work.


If you haven't created a collaboration recently or you want a preview of what to expect:

Review this article to see screenshots and steps for creating a task.

Now that you've seen the steps, try it for yourself.

Create a task for your coworker​

You know one of the patients scheduled for next week is notorious for forgetting their appointments and not updating the front desk with their insurance information.

Create a task to request that before the end of the week, your colleague Alan calls the patient and confirms their next appointment and insurance details.

Task 1: Start
  1. Start a new collaboration with the type "task".

Since this is about a specific patient, you can link the task to the patient, so that Alan can quickly open their record to confirm their contact and next appointment details.

Task 2: Add Detail
  1. Select a patient so that the task has a link to their record.
  2. Make the task due before the end of the week.
  3. Assign the task to a colleague.
  4. Enter a message describing what you'd like them to do and then create the task.

Now that you've created the task, it appears for both you and Alan in the My Collaborations list under Provider Collaborations as well as in the Tasks panel.

Alan's panel also shows that he has an unread message by making the subject bold and increasing his unread message counter in the top right corner by one.

Keep track of a task​

The Tasks panel on the Provider Dashboard lets you see all of the tasks you're involved with. You can see the statuses and due dates of your tasks right when you log in so you don't forget to complete tasks that are due soon.

The name of the person who created the task is also bolded so you can differentiate between tasks you've sent and received.

To continue the scenario: a little while later you're reviewing the tasks you've created recently and see that the task you created for Alan is due today but hasn't been updated at all.

Instead of creating a new task, send a follow-up message inside the original task to clarify whether he's completed the work.

Task 3: Track
  1. Find the recent task in your Tasks panel.
  2. Open the task from the panel.
  3. Send a follow-up message to clarify if the task is complete.

Task complete​

Your unread message counter goes up and when you click it you see that the task is marked complete and there is a message from Alan that he did call the patient but forgot to update the task.

You've saved the patient from an extra phone call and still confirmed that they were reminded to bring their insurance information to their next appointment. All by using the tasks feature to request and track work inside of ICE!


Before you pick the next topic to explore, consider the following questions:

  • What are some ways you can use tasks in your daily work?
  • When would you prefer using a task instead of a collaboration?
  • What questions do you have about sending and managing tasks?

Write down your answers for future reference or bring them to your next training session.

Next steps​

When you're working:

  • Use a task to coordinate work with a colleague in the next week.
  • To help get yourself started, use one of the examples you came up with in the question section above.

For training:

  • Choose the next training module you want to try.