Internal notes and mentions in Chats

Not everything typed in a patient thread belongs to the patient. A question for whoever's covering next, a flag for billing, a running note on something to watch — Chats keeps all of that one toggle away from the message you're already writing, instead of pushing it into a separate app.

Sending an internal message

Every patient and lead thread — whatever channel it's on — has a Message / Internal toggle in the composer, next to the send button. Switch to Internal and the whole box turns amber, with a banner spelling out what that means:

Internal note — visible to your team only, never sent to the patient.

Nothing typed in that mode reaches the patient, regardless of whether the thread itself is SMS, email, or in-app.

The rest of this article walks through what each of those does.

@Mentioning a teammate

Type @ — or tap the mention button next to the toggle — and the same picker used everywhere else in Ona opens: keep typing to narrow it, Enter or click to insert. See Mentioning teammates for how the picker and its notification work; what's specific to chat is where a mention goes afterward.

Every mention you're tagged in lands in your Mentions tab, split into Open and All. Opening one takes you straight to the message, in context. Once it's handled, Resolve — either from the Mentions list or the Resolve mention button in the conversation header — clears it from Open without deleting the message itself.

Notes: a dedicated place for team-only context

Some context doesn't belong inside a day-to-day conversation at all — it belongs on the patient. That's what Notes are: standalone, internal-only threads scoped to a patient, opened from the Notes tab on their channel strip (see Messaging patients by text, email, and chat for the rest of that tab strip).

Starting one works differently from every other thread in Ona: tap New note and you land straight in a blank composer — the note itself isn't created until you send. Whatever you write becomes both the note's first message and, from its first several words, its title. There's nothing to name up front, and nothing left half-created if you change your mind and navigate away.

Once a note exists, its title isn't fixed. Open it and use the conversation header's menu to Rename note, or to Resolve note when it's no longer live — reopen the same way if something changes. A patient's Notes tab shows a count of how many of their notes are still unresolved, so open items don't quietly age out of sight.

Start a note from a message you're already writing

Sometimes you only realize a message deserves its own Note after you've started typing it — in the middle of an ordinary SMS or email conversation, not from a patient's Notes tab at all. Start a note, next to the mention button, is for exactly that: activate it before you send, and the message you finish writing becomes a new Note instead of a reply in the thread you're on.

The thread you started from isn't left without a trace. A message reading "Started a note — ‹title›" is posted there instead, and the title is a link straight to the note. Nothing about the note itself is different from one started the ordinary way — it's titled from what you wrote, and can be renamed and resolved the same way.

Start a note only appears on an established, patient-linked conversation — there's no earlier point to leave a redirect from on a brand-new draft, and Notes are always scoped to a patient.