Using The AI Help Widget
The AI Help widget is a small panel that sits at the bottom center of every page once you’re logged into OutSmart. It does two things: it answers questions about how OutSmart works using this knowledgebase, and it lets you request support from our team when an article isn’t enough.
This article covers what each part of the widget does, when to use the chat versus when to ask for a person, and how the three support urgency levels are handled differently on our end.
Opening the widget
The widget appears as a small circular button at the bottom center of every page after you sign in. Click it to slide the panel open. Click outside the panel, or the button again, to close it.
The widget loads on every practitioner-facing page — Dashboard, Calendar, the patient workspace, Smart Forms, Dispensary, Reports, your profile, settings. It’s available on the page you’re working on without taking you away from it.
Asking a question
When the panel is open, type your question in the message box at the bottom and hit Send (or press Enter). The assistant searches this knowledgebase for the most relevant articles and writes back a short answer with links to the source articles it pulled from.
The chat handles plain-English questions, so you don’t need to know the exact feature name. Examples that work well:
- “How do I cancel an appointment and refund the deposit?”
- “What’s the difference between Smart Forms V1 and V2?”
- “Why can’t I edit this form anymore?”
- “Where do I see the audit trail for a fax I sent yesterday?”
- “How do I add another practitioner to my office?”
You can keep the conversation going — follow-up questions in the same chat have the earlier messages as context, so you can ask “and what about cancellation fees?” after the first answer without restating the whole question.
What the chat is good at
- Single-task questions (“how do I do X?”) — pulls the right article straight to you.
- Comparing features (“what’s the difference between A and B?”) — pulls both articles and answers the diff.
- Pointing you at the right page when you don’t know what to call something.
- Pulling exact behaviour from a reference page (timing rules, status meanings, who-can-do-what tables).
What to read the full article for instead
- Long walkthroughs (the Quickstart, the Pre-Launch Checklist, the per-feature setup pages).
- Anything where you want to see screenshots in sequence — the chat answers are text-only.
- Anything where you want to skim a whole section to learn what’s there.
The chat assistant tells you which articles its answer came from. Click those links to jump into the full article in this knowledgebase when you want more depth.
Requesting support — the Get Support form
If the chat doesn’t have your answer, you’ve hit a bug, or you need a person from our team, click the Get Support option in the widget. It opens a short form that asks for your contact details, what you need help with, and an urgency level.
The urgency you pick changes how the request reaches our team and how fast you’ll hear back. Pick the level that matches the situation — there’s no benefit to over-stating urgency, and it makes it harder to triage if everything comes in as urgent.
| Urgency | What it’s for | What happens on our end |
|---|---|---|
| General question | Non-urgent questions, suggestions, feature requests, general feedback. Examples: “is there a way to do X?”, “I noticed a typo on the booking page”, “can you add support for Y?”. | An email lands in our general support inbox. You’re copied on the same email so you have a record. Our team reviews and replies during business hours. |
| Moderately important | Something is genuinely blocking part of your day but the clinic can still operate. Examples: “I can’t send this fax”, “a patient’s saved Smart Form isn’t showing up”, “the dispensary report is loading slowly”. | Our on-call team is paged by email, SMS, and push notification. You get a clean receipt email confirming what you sent and what to expect. A team member will be in touch as soon as someone is available. |
| Urgent | Something is broken right now and the clinic can’t work around it. Examples: “no one in the clinic can log in”, “a critical patient record has disappeared”, “online booking is taking bookings but not creating appointments”. | Same channels as Moderately important, but at the highest priority on our paging system. You get the same receipt email. We escalate immediately. |
What we attach to every Get Support request
So our team can help you faster, every Get Support submission includes a small context block at the bottom of the email:
- The page in OutSmart you were on when you opened the form.
- The last question you asked the AI chat (if you’d been chatting before submitting).
- Your browser and version.
- Your local time and timezone.
- Your user ID and your office ID.
We don’t include any patient information, chart content, or other protected health information in the email — just the page-and-session context above. If your problem touches a specific patient or record, mention them by an internal identifier (e.g. patient ID) in the description, not by their name.
Choosing the right urgency level
The honest way to think about it:
- General question — you’d be fine waiting a day or two.
- Moderately important — you’d like to hear back the same day; the issue is real and is affecting your work.
- Urgent — every minute the issue persists, the clinic is losing the ability to function.
Picking Urgent for something that’s not urgent makes it harder for our team to spot the actually-urgent things in the queue. If you’re not sure, pick Moderately important — the difference between that and Urgent is whether we wake someone up.
Tips for getting the best answers
- Be specific about what you tried. “I clicked the Refund button on the invoice but nothing happened” tells us much more than “the refund doesn’t work.”
- Mention any error message you saw, word for word. Even partial wording is useful.
- One topic per submission. If you have two unrelated issues, send two requests — they’ll usually go to different people.
- Use the chat first for “how do I…” questions. It’s faster than waiting for a reply and the answer is usually there. Save the Get Support form for things the chat genuinely can’t answer or when you need a person.
When the widget isn’t there
If you can’t see the widget on a page where you’d expect to, it’s almost always one of these:
- You’re on a patient-portal page (where patients log in to fill forms or view records). The AI Help widget is for clinic staff and doesn’t appear on patient-portal pages.
- You’re on a public booking page (the version your patients use to book). Same reason — patient-facing, no widget.
- Your browser is blocking scripts on the page (uncommon, but check your browser’s extensions).
If you’re on a normal OutSmart practitioner page and the widget is missing, contact us at contact.outsmartemr.com — that’s a bug we want to know about.
Related Pages
- Welcome — the knowledgebase landing page, with the AI Help widget overview.
- The OutSmart Interface — orientation to the main OutSmart screens where the widget appears.
- Quickstart — first-hour walkthrough for new accounts; the widget is the fastest way to ask questions while you work through it.