Practice Chat & Chat Groups: Quick Guide

Instant chat in MediRecords is designed to make communication between colleagues quick, efficient, and fully integrated into your workflow. Instead of relying on external messaging apps or phone calls, you can securely send and receive messages within the platform, keeping all patient-related conversations centralised. Chat threads are automatically saved on the Home Page, so you can revisit conversations at any time without losing content.

This feature is especially useful in a busy practice where fast updates and collaboration are essential. You can create chat groups for teams, link patient records directly into messages, and filter or search through past conversations for easy reference. Notifications and unread message counters ensure that nothing is missed. By bringing messaging inside MediRecords, this chat feature keeps communication streamlined, secure, and tied directly to patient care.

Contents:

1. What is the Chat Function?

2. Creating a Chat Group

3. Editing a Chat Group

4. Creating a New Chat

5. Replying to a Chat Message

6. Searching Chat Messages

7. Filtering Chat Messages

8. Hyperlinking a Patient Record in a Chat Message

9. Patient Related Chat History

10. Chat Notifications

What is the Chat Function?

MediRecords offers a convenient instant messaging feature, allowing you to communicate seamlessly with your colleagues and other healthcare professionals within the practice. This feature is primarily accessed from the Universal Communication Bar.

By clicking on this function, you'll be presented with a comprehensive list of all your active chat threads and it will display the number of unread messages in your chat counter.

Instant chat can be accessed from any page in MediRecords. Whenever a new chat session is initiated with a user, a new chat thread is created. MediRecords stores a complete history of all chat threads on the Home Page. Users can navigate through their historical chat threads by scrolling and adjusting the filter based on their specific search criteria.

Creating a Chat Group

1. Click More to reveal a drop-down list, and click Settings.

2. Click User Groups
   
    

3. Select Chat Groups and this will open a new window for Chat Groups.
    
   
    

4.  To create a new group, click on the "+" sign and use single clicks to select the users from the left hand panel, and this would move them to the right hand panel. 

   

    

   5. Once all the users have been added, type in the group name in the group name field and click on Save.

   

    

Editing a Chat Group

1. To display a list of the existing chat groups, click the down arrow at the top of the form.
   
   
    

2. Select the group from the list, and click the Pen Icon on the right-hand side.

   

   
    

3. To remove a user from the group, click the X next to their name. To add a user to the group click the user's name on the left hand panel to add it to the right hand panel

   

    

4. Once you have finished editing the group, click Save to apply the changes.
   
   

Note: An error will come up if you wish to remove yourself as a member of the chat group while logged in.

Creating a New Chat

1. Navigate to the Universal Communication Bar and click the Chat Icon

2. To create a new chat message, click New Chat.


In the new chat form, you can choose to send a message to Users or a predefined Chat Group at your practice. 

Replying to a Chat Message

When you receive a new chat message, or a response via an existing chat thread, it will be flagged with a Blue Dot next to it, indicating that it is Unread.




To respond to a chat message, hover your mouse over the message and click to open the message.



Individual chat threads have a message box at the top, and a full history of the chat thread is stored below the message.



To write a response, click into the Reply field and type in a message.




Press Enter, or click Send to send the message.

The sent message will then appear in the chat thread below.

Searching Chat Messages

1. To search for a message, click the Search-box and type in a Keyword from the message you are looking for. You can also use keywords from the patient name to search for messages where a patient file was flagged in the message.

2. Press Enter and the system will display a list of the closest matches.

Filtering Chat Messages

To filter the list of messages, click Filter to reveal a drop-down list and select one or more filters under Status and Period.

Hyperlinking a Patient Record in a Chat Message

1. Open the Home page

2. Navigate to the Chat section of the page

3. Click New to open the new chat form

4. Click User or Group and type in the name of the user/group

5. Click Patient Name and type in the name of the patient
   
   
    

6. Type in the message contents

7. Click Send to send the message

8. This will create a blue hyperlink on the patient's name, which will open the patient record when clicked on.
   
   

Patient Related Chat History

To review the chat history related to a patient, go to the Dashboard on the patient record and click on chat history.

This will open the chat history and reveal all messages related to the patient.

Chat Notifications

When you receive a new chat message from another user, you will receive a pop-up notification in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.



You can click on the message to view it right away, or you can return to the Home Page where it will be saved in your chat threads as an Unread message.

To help users keep track of unread messages, MediRecords utilizes an Unread Message Counter in the Universal Communication Bar. A number will appear on the Chat icon to indicate the quantity of unread messages.

The message counter is live, and will automatically increase as you receive new chat messages. 
In case you don't see a message that has been sent to you, kindly refresh the page.