Message the Care Team Securely

Who / when: the Patient (in the patient app) and the Care Team (a clinician or nurse inside the EHR), whenever there is a non-urgent question to ask or answer between visits. Messages are encrypted and stay inside Veona — the content is never sent out by email or SMS, so a question and its answer are read only by signing in.

A couple of terms:

• Secure message thread — a private conversation between one patient and the care team, kept entirely inside Veona.
• Internal note — a message a staff member writes for other staff only. It rides in the same thread but is invisible to the patient, on purpose.

We will follow Amina, who wants to check a dosing question, and the clinician who answers her.

1. Patient — sign in to the patient app (see Sign In Passwordless With a Magic Link) and open the Messages tab. The screen explains the rule plainly: “Secure messages with your care team. We never send the content by email — sign in to read it.”
2. Patient — press “New Message”, write your question on the “New Message” screen, optionally attach one of your own uploaded documents, and send it. (You can attach files you added on the Documents tab.)
3. Care Team — inside the EHR, open Portal → Messages. Your patient’s message arrives in the secure inbox. Open the thread to read it.
4. Care Team — type your answer in the reply box (“Write a reply to the patient…”) and send it. A clinician or portal coordinator can also share a document into the thread; a nurse can reply but not share documents.
5. Patient — back in the app, your Messages tab shows an unread badge. Open the conversation; the clinician’s reply is there. Add a follow-up in the “Reply” box and press “Send Reply” to keep the conversation going.

Note

Internal notes stay with staff — always. When a staff member needs to jot something for colleagues (a handover, a clinical aside), they mark the message as an Internal Note. The compose box even reminds them: “Write a staff-only internal note (the patient never sees this).” Internal notes carry an Internal Note badge in the staff view and are filtered out of everything the patient is served — the patient’s app only ever shows the messages addressed to them. There is no setting a patient can flip to reveal one.

Caution

Secure messaging is for non-urgent matters. The clinic decides how quickly the inbox is worked; for anything urgent or an emergency, use the clinic’s phone line or emergency services, not a message. Each side sees only their own conversations — a patient sees their threads, never another patient’s, and the care team reaches a thread only through the patient’s record.

Tip

Need to send a prior result or a photo to the team? Upload it first under the Documents tab (covered in Download Documents From the Portal), then attach it when you compose or reply — the file travels inside the encrypted thread, never as an email attachment.

What happens next

The full conversation — your messages and the team’s replies — stays in your Messages tab for reference, and in the patient’s record on the staff side, while internal notes remain visible only to staff. If a clinician wants to send you formal, one-way guidance instead of a back-and-forth, they can author and eSign patient instructions, which arrive on your Care tab — see Send eSigned Patient Instructions to the Portal.

Follow the trail

• Previous: Sign In, Reset and Recover a Portal Account
• Related: Send eSigned Patient Instructions to the Portal · Set Notification Preferences and Channels