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FS: Send instant messages

Feel welcome to use these details and activity design comments as a starting point to enhance Send instant messages for your learners or training sessions.

  • 🎓 Role: New User
  • 📚 Category: Communication
  • ⏱ Length: 3 to 10 minutes
  • ⚡️ Summary: Learn how to send messages to other people in the system.
  • 🧑‍🏫 Instructional-Design Objective: Learners will be able to describe what a collaboration is, send one to a colleague, and update the status of a collaboration to keep their inbox organized.
  • 🗺 Includes: Activities, support materials, facilitator summary, and next steps.

Configuration​

Environment configuration needed to support this training.

  • 🔐 Permissions: Manage Patients, Collaborations
  • 🖼 Panel Views: Default View, View with Collaborations Panel, Tasks Panel
  • 🧪 Sample Data: Simple patient records to find and review
  • ⚙️ Practice Settings: Clinic Management

Facilitation materials​

Links to facilitation materials if you want to lead training on this topic.

  • Activity Handout PDF Learners can keep track of their progress, focus on the activities, and record questions or interesting points for future reference.
  • Demonstration Facilitator's Guide Not included. Training articles linked in module.

Introduction: Quickly message team members​

A workflow overview or worked example so that learners can see what’s possible and what success looks like in the system.

Use the introduction as a chance to deliver a short pre-training experience that also clarifies why a learner should care about this training or workflow.

  • Use a scenario that is relevant to your learners' daily work.
  • Connect the learning to a challenge the learners regularly need to overcome.
  • Address any common questions or workflow challenges up front.

Review the activity breakdowns below for tips and possible challenges you might want to address in this introduction.

Activity 1: Start a new conversation​

A short exercise to get learners comfortable sending messages, seeing how messages appear in the system, and managing them.

This section can be customized with contextual examples of the types of messages your learners would send internally.

For example, front-desk staff may be discussing appointment confirmations and patient arrivals, whereas clinical staff may be discussing treatment notes and assessments.

Task 1: Start​

  1. Start a new collaboration and send a message to your coworker.

Possible Challenge Learners may be overwhelmed by the number of options they have when creating a collaboration. The collaborators field is what you're looking for and clicking Create is what sends the collaboration.

Tip If you expect your learners to work primarily with the Provider Collaborations panel, you can have them create a new collaboration from the panel menu.

Task 2: Reply​

  1. Open the new entry that appears in your list of collaborations

Tip If you use the Collaborations panel, you can have learners find their new message in both the panel and the Provider Collaborations area.

Goal Learners see where the collaborations they send and receive will appear.

  1. Send a follow-up message inside the collaboration you just sent

Tip Highlight the ability to hit enter or return when composing your message and not have it accidentally send.

Possible Challenge There may be a 1-3s delay when sending a response before it appears.

Task 3: Archive​

  1. Archive the collaboration you started

Tip Archiving only affects the messages that you see. Your collaborators aren't affected when you archive a message.

  1. Confirm that it now appears under Archived

Tip This area is collapsed by default in Provider Collaborations.

Possible Challenge Archived conversations still appear in the Provider Collaborations panel.

Activity 2: Message multiple people​

This activity takes the basics from the first activity and asks learners to send a message to multiple people and to add people after the collaboration has been started.

  1. Start a new collaboration that includes multiple people and send them a message.

Possible Challenge Learners may find it tedious to add multiple people one at a time.

  1. Open the new entry that appears in your list of collaborations

Goal Learners see where the collaborations they send and receive will appear.

  1. Add one extra collaborator who wasn't included in the original message

Tip People added to a collaboration later will still see the full message history.

Reflection: The effective communicator​

What other kinds of messages might you send to your colleagues?

Have learners consider:

  • Work-related reasons you might message a colleague.
  • Non-work-related reasons you might message a colleague.
  • How keeping conversations inside ICE can help reduce distractions and keep people productive.

When is it beneficial to include a link to a patient's record with your message?

Have learners consider:

  • How often these messages are about patients.
  • How your collaborator would access a patient's record if they had to.
  • Whether or not the patient can see this message.
    • Patients cannot see these messages. There is currently no patient portal functionality.

What questions do you have about sending and managing collaborations?

Can be discussed or saved for the next training session.

Record these questions. Consider how the training could be improved to address common ones.