What the reception channel is
Anyone looking at your public page can ask a question without booking anything and without creating an account. They write the question, confirm their email through a one-time link, and the exchange lands in your practice’s inbox inside Vitena.
It is deliberately the front desk taking questions, not a chat app for patients in the middle of treatment. That is why it sits next to your booking page rather than inside the clinical record: the people writing are mostly deciding whether to come at all — do you take my insurer, what does that cost, is there anything Thursday evening.
Working the inbox
The inbox is built for the questions that repeat, not for long conversations.
- A new question arrives — you are notified by email and on your phone
- Open the thread and reply, or insert a saved reply and adjust it
- Mark the thread done when it is handled; done threads stay searchable
- Search and filter when someone writes again weeks later
Tips
- Save a reply for every question you answer more than twice — opening hours, parking, what a first visit costs
- A thread is not a medical record: anything clinical belongs in the client’s notes, not here
How much is included
Reception conversations have their own monthly allowance on the free plan, separate from appointments: a message thread never eats into your appointment allowance and an appointment never eats into your threads.
As with bookings, a message is never refused. Past the allowance the sender’s name and contact details are masked in the inbox — you can still see that a real person is waiting — and upgrading reveals every waiting thread at once. For the exact current limits, see the fair-use section of the Terms.
Letting the AI receptionist take the first pass
You can switch on an AI receptionist that answers these messages out of hours from what your practice has published — hours, services, published prices and free slots — and hands anything else to a person. It is optional and off until you turn it on.
See the separate article on the AI receptionist for how it is set up, what it is allowed to say, and where it stops.
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