Channels for the team
#front-desk, #clinical, #billing, #on-call. Public channels everyone can find, private ones for sensitive topics.
Chats
Chats, right next to the chart.
A familiar messenger for staff and patients — channels, DMs — without leaving the clinical system. Discuss a patient without losing the patient.
- Channels & DMs
- Threaded replies
- @mentions
- Role-scoped
A clinic runs on quiet conversations: “quick question,” “can you grab room 3,” “the Garcia lab came back weird.” Most of those conversations are happening on Slack, iMessage, or SMS today — outside any clinical system, outside any compliance boundary.
Ona Chats gives your team a real messenger inside the clinical system. Familiar shape — channels, DMs, threads. Serious underneath — HIPAA-isolated, role-scoped, patient-linked.
01 · The compliance gap
iMessage about a patient is still a HIPAA incident.
Nobody wants to hear it, but it's true — and your team is doing it right now.
Banning tools doesn't work. Staff will chat — they need to, to run the clinic. The question is whether that chat lives in a logged, encrypted, role-scoped system, or a consumer texting app with zero trail.
Chats in Ona is the version your compliance officer can live with and your team will actually adopt: familiar interface, sensible permissions, context that stays inside the clinical record.
02 · What you get
A messenger that feels familiar, with the plumbing you actually need.
DMs + small groups
Quick one-to-ones and small-group huddles. End-to-end encrypted, with full audit trail for compliance.
Threaded replies
Keep the main channel readable. Side conversations live in threads that resolve cleanly when the topic is done.
Pin chat to a chart
“Pin to Garcia, M.” turns a message thread into part of the patient record. The context travels with the patient, forever.
Share files, labs, images
All attachments scanned, encrypted at rest, and scoped to the workspace. No more forwarding DICOM files through personal email.
Works in the browser, wherever you are
Ona runs in the browser on any desktop or mobile device. Notifications respect quiet hours and role-level filters so the phone stays quiet when it should.
03 · Patient-linked by design
Conversations that stay with the chart.
Discuss without derailing
Quick question about a patient? Start a thread. Every message attached to a patient record gets tagged for the audit log automatically.Turn chat into decisions
“Agreed, let's run labs.” → create a task, assign it, link the message. The decision is captured, not lost to scroll.Hand off to a colleague
@mention to transfer ownership. The thread travels. The pinned summary becomes the handoff notes.Audit-ready, quietly
If compliance ever asks, every message has a timestamp, author, and scope. Nothing has to be reconstructed from memory.
“The thing I love most is also the quietest — my team stopped texting me after hours about patient stuff. It all lives in Ona, with notification rules they actually respect.”
04 · Set up right
Sensible defaults, flexible when you need them.
Multi-location groups
Per-location channels, shared admin.
#sf-front-desk, #la-front-desk, #all-leadership. Clear separation; shared directory.
Clinician + MA pairs
DMs scoped to the care team.
Pair-level rooms for provider + MA. Patient messages from the portal route straight in.
On-call rotations
The on-call thread follows the rotation.
Who's on-call this week? The channel membership updates automatically from your schedule.
Vendor / partner comms
External channels, still compliant.
Invite a lab, a pharmacy, or a consulting provider into a scoped channel. They see what they need, nothing more.
FAQ
Common questions.
Is this separate from patient-facing messaging?
Yes. Chats is staff-to-staff. Secure Messaging is staff-to-patient. They share the patient record but live in separate UIs, with separate permission models.
Can we migrate our Slack history?
Moving off Slack is something we help with during onboarding — we'll talk through what's worth importing and what isn't. Private DMs stay with you by design; we don't touch them.
Retention and exports?
Retention is configurable per channel type and every message lives in the same audit log as the rest of the chart. Export by channel or workspace when you need to.
Ready when you are
Bring the team conversation on-platform.
Book a fifteen-minute walkthrough — bring a real internal workflow and we'll show it inside Chats.