Reply to patients in your own voice

Why it matters

Patient messages arrive without a reply attached. Draft Assist is a Magic Button, one of the one-click buttons Tabflows places beside the work they act on (the settings call them smart buttons). In Spruce it shows up as the AI DRAFT bar and writes a first draft from the conversation and the context Tabflows has, so your reply starts from a draft you can edit.

Preferences teach Sidekick, Tabflows' AI assistant, how you like to write, so those drafts start closer to your voice.

A smooth draft can still get a fact wrong. You review every word, and you press send.

How the AI DRAFT bar works

The bar sits above the Spruce message box, labeled AI DRAFT with the Tabflows mark. It appears once the conversation is linked to a patient in Tabflows, with Sidekick on your account and Hide smart buttons off.

1. Open a patient conversation in Spruce. By default a draft appears on its own. If you turned automatic drafting off, select Generate.
2. Read the draft. The info button beside it, Explain this draft, shows its intent, the evidence it used, how your tone and preferences shaped it, and what it left uncertain.
3. Select Insert to put the draft in the message box.
4. To revise it there, select Enhance in the bar, or hover Enhance and type a direction such as "Make it warmer and shorter". The revision replaces the current draft for your review and is never sent automatically. The undo arrow beside Enhance restores the previous wording.
5. Edit anything that needs it, then send the reply yourself.

Before it writes, the bar reads the recent messages in the conversation, the patient's summaries from your connected systems, a summary of your clinic's Practice Brain (the shared clinic knowledge, such as policies, services and workflows), your saved preferences, and the prices synced from your clinic's billing system. It is set up to state a price only when that price is in the billing list, and otherwise to say the team will confirm the cost. Check every price in a draft before you send.

Choose when it drafts

Two switches control the bar. In the Tabflows sidebar, select Settings (the gear), then Clinic settings. Your Profile opens in a new tab on Account, and both switches are in its Sidekick section.

• Hide smart buttons hides the AI DRAFT bar in every conversation, along with Enhance and the AI task recommendation lightbulb. It also hides Referral Assist. It leaves the Tabflows sidebar and AI Patient Summary in place.
• Disable auto-generation makes the bar wait for you to select Generate.

Leave automatic drafting on when you handle a high volume of messages, use the bar for most replies, or would rather edit a draft than start from a blank box. Turn Disable auto-generation on when you'd rather decide which conversations need a draft.

Teach it your voice with Preferences

A preference is a personal instruction you save for Sidekick. It has a title, a short label like "Communication Style", and content, like "I prefer to be very formal and warm with my patients." Every preference you save is applied when Sidekick drafts patient replies.

Preferences shape tone and format. The draft is told not to let them override the conversation, the patient's facts or Tabflows' safety rules, and they don't make missing patient facts available. Keep personal style in preferences: tone and warmth, length, directness, greetings and sign-offs, phrases to use or avoid, and how next steps appear. Clinic-wide facts such as services, policies, forms and approved education belong in Practice Brain, where the whole team shares them.

Add one on the Your preferences tab of the same Profile page: select Add Preference, give it a short title and one specific instruction, and select Create. It appears in Your preferences. Edit a preference with its pencil, or delete it for good with its trash icon after you confirm.

Sidekick can also save a preference itself, when you ask it to remember something or when it notices a clear, repeated pattern in your conversations. Every saved preference shapes your drafts, so read Your preferences now and then, and edit or delete anything you don't want.

Specific instructions work better than broad ones. "Use a warm, conversational tone" works better than "Be nice", "Keep messages under 150 words" works better than "Be brief", and "End with one clear next step" works better than "Make it actionable". Make separate preferences for tone, structure, terminology, greetings and sign-offs, and update them when your style changes.

Review before you send

Check every draft for:

• Clinical accuracy
• Appropriate tone
• The correct patient context
• A clear next step
• Details that shouldn't be included

If important clinical details are missing, treat the draft as incomplete. Check it against the source information, and add or correct anything needed before you send.