A patient at the iPad kiosk can leave your practice a message — a question for reception, a change of contact details, something they'd rather not say across the front desk — along with a phone number or email address to reach them on. Those messages wait for you in the messages page in the portal.
Until now, the only way to know one had arrived was to go and look. Now Finger-Ink can email you or your team instead, in the same way the inbox already emails you when a response needs action.
Turning it on
Open Messages in Portal and click the settings button above the list. Switch on "Notify via email when messages need attention", choose who should hear about it, and save.
The default for this setting is off, and it won't save until you've picked at least one recipient — an enabled switch with nobody to email would do nothing.
Who can receive them
Under "Who should we email?" you can pick:
Your portal users — anyone with a Finger-Ink login on your account.
Any verified email address — addresses that don't belong to a portal user at all, like a shared reception inbox.
Verified email addresses need to be added and confirmed once, on the verified email addresses page. After that they're selectable here and anywhere else Finger-Ink asks who to email.
Change the list whenever you like. If a portal user is deactivated, or a verified address is removed, they simply stop being emailed — there's nothing to tidy up here.
What the email says
The email tells you how many messages have come in, and gives you a button straight to them. That's all it contains.
☝️ The message itself never leaves Finger-Ink. The patient's name, what they wrote and how to contact them are only ever visible to someone signed in to Portal — the email carries a count and a link, nothing else. That matters when the recipient is a shared inbox several people can read.
The count is the number of messages that have arrived since the last email we sent you — not the total sitting in your inbox. If two arrive, you're emailed about two; if two more arrive before anyone deals with them, the next email says two again, not four.
How often they arrive
Messages that come in close together are gathered into one email rather than sent one at a time, and no more than one email goes out every five minutes. A busy Monday morning won't fill anyone's inbox.
You also won't be nagged. Once we've emailed about a message, we won't email about it again (unless we do a portal update, which happens from time-to-time). Usually, a message that sits unactioned for a week generates one email, not seven. The next email comes when the next message does.
☝️ Because of that, this is a heads-up rather than a to-do list. Your messages inbox is still the place that shows everything waiting for you.
Which messages count
Only messages patients leave at the kiosk trigger these emails.
If you've got check-in notification messages turned on, they won't trigger these emails. They appear in your messages list too, but they arrive constantly through the day, and check-in already has its own "Email the practitioner" option in your kiosk settings — one designed to reach the person actually seeing the patient. Mixing the two would mean an email every few minutes and nobody reading any of them.
Turning it off
Switch "Notify via email when messages need attention" off in the same place. Nothing else changes: messages keep arriving in Portal exactly as before, and any that were waiting stay waiting.