Running a Telehealth Session (Doctor Side)

Before you open the room

A telehealth session is still a clinical appointment — it just happens to run in a browser tab instead of a treatment room. Everything you'd expect from an in-person visit is here in some form: a record of who you're seeing, a way to take notes as you go, a way to share something visual, and a way to hand the patient paperwork mid-conversation. The difference is that all of it is compressed into one screen, so it's worth learning where things live before your first real session rather than hunting for a button while a patient is waiting.

When you open a session before the patient has joined, you land on a Waiting for patient... screen showing the room ID rather than a live video feed. This is normal — the room exists and is ready, it just has nobody in it yet. Use the Copy patient invite link button to grab a shareable link and send it by text, email, or through whatever channel you'd normally reach that patient on. The link is specific to this appointment, so don't reuse an old one for a different visit.

The Waiting for patient screen, showing the room ID and the Copy patient invite link button before the patient has joined the call.

Reading the call header at a glance

Once the patient joins, the header across the top of the call becomes your dashboard for the session — everything you'd otherwise have to ask out loud ("how long have we been on this call?", "is the connection actually okay?") is answered visually instead, so you can stay focused on the conversation.

The telehealth call header showing the live timer, patient name chip, connection-quality bars, an active Transcribing badge, and the gear and red End buttons on the right.

The left sidebar: everything about this patient, without leaving the call

In an in-person visit, you'd glance at a chart on the desk between questions. The sidebar is the telehealth equivalent — three tabs that stay available for the entire call, so you're never forced to choose between looking at the patient and looking at their record.

Patient tab

Shows a clinical snapshot — vitals, allergies, conditions, and medications — pulled straight from the record, alongside a free-text session-note textarea. Jotting notes as you talk, rather than trying to reconstruct the conversation from memory afterward, is the single biggest difference in note quality most practitioners notice after switching from paper-after-the-fact to typing during the call.

Files tab

Lists every file exchanged during the session, from either side, in one place. This matters because file activity in the chat panel scrolls out of view as the conversation continues — if a patient sent you a photo ten minutes ago and you need it again, the Files tab is faster than scrolling back through chat history.

Forms tab

Lists every form template you've sent during the call, each showing a completed or pending status. Click View response on a completed form to see exactly what the patient submitted, without leaving the call or waiting for the visit to end.

The left sidebar with the Patient tab active, showing vitals, allergies, conditions, and medications above a session-note textarea; the Files and Forms tabs are visible along the top of the sidebar.

The controls bar

The controls bar sits at the bottom of the call and holds every action you'd reach for during a session. None of these require ending or interrupting the call to use.

• <strong>Mic</strong> and <strong>Camera</strong> toggles — mute or unmute, turn your camera on or off.
• <strong>Share screen</strong> — opens your operating system's native picker so you choose a window, tab, or full screen. Sharing stops automatically if you close the shared window or tab, rather than continuing to broadcast a blank screen.
• <strong>Annotate / Sketch mode</strong> — opens a dedicated full-screen drawing stage, covered in detail below.
• <strong>Transcribe session</strong> — starts or stops live browser speech-to-text, shown in a bottom strip that can be hidden if it becomes distracting.
• Video quality dropdown — choose HD, SD, Low, or Audio only, for when you want to manually override the automatic quality stepping described further down.
• <strong>Chat</strong> toggle — show or hide the chat panel.

Sketch mode, and when it's actually worth using

Sketch mode opens a dedicated full-screen drawing stage with its own toolbar. It exists for the moments where words alone are ambiguous — where exactly on the shoulder does it hurt, which side of the abdomen, how far up the leg does the swelling go. A verbal description ("upper right side, kind of toward the back") leaves room for the patient to picture the wrong spot; a marked diagram doesn't.

It's most useful for anything spatial: marking where a bandage or brace should sit, circling an area to monitor for changes, or sketching a simple diagram of a home exercise. It's less useful — and slower than just saying it — for anything that isn't inherently visual, so reach for it deliberately rather than by default.

Sketch mode's full-screen drawing stage with a chest body-part outline template loaded, the 9-swatch color picker and Pencil/Bold/Marker/Eraser tool picker along the top, and Clear and Exit sketch buttons.

Sending forms mid-conversation

A Form dropdown in the chat header lists your clinic's form templates, so you can hand a patient something to fill out without ending the call and following up by email afterward. Click a template to send it into the patient's chat as either an inline fillable form or a link, depending on how that form was built. This is the right tool for a quick consent checklist, a symptom questionnaire, or a pain-scale check partway through the visit — anything you'd otherwise have to remember to send later, and might not.

Track what you've sent, and whether it's been answered, from the Forms tab in the sidebar rather than scrolling back through chat to find it.

Chat and file sharing

• The chat panel shows an unread badge when there are new messages, and an <em>"is typing..."</em> indicator when the patient is composing a reply — useful for knowing whether to wait a beat before moving on.
• Use the attach button in chat to share a file directly with the patient, such as an instruction sheet or an image.
• Your own video thumbnail (picture-in-picture) can be dragged anywhere within the video stage, so it never has to block the patient's face or a shared screen while you reposition it.

Why the call handles bad connections for you

A meaningful share of telehealth patients are joining from a mobile connection, a rural broadband line, or a spotty office Wi-Fi network rather than a wired connection with headroom to spare. Rather than letting a weak connection end the call outright, ClinyPal tries to keep the visit going in degraded form first — because a lower-resolution picture that stays connected is almost always more useful clinically than a crisp picture that keeps cutting out.

If you'd rather set the ceiling yourself — for example, deliberately dropping to Audio only on a call you already know is going to be unstable, rather than waiting for it to step down on its own — use the video quality dropdown in the controls bar.

Ending the call and closing the loop

Common questions