Growing and Managing Your Team

Introduction to teammates on Spruce

Spruce is built for teams, helping you communicate securely and collaborate around your patients' care. Adding teammates to your Spruce organization creates a shared inbox through which all team members can engage in patient communication and secure messaging with each other.

To see all of the teammates currently on your account, open your Settings and select Teammates.

Inviting a teammate

NOTE: Only Administrators of your organization on Spruce can invite or remove new teammates.
Invite Teammates using their Personal Cell Phone Numbers NOT their direct Spruce Lines.
To invite a teammate from the web version of Spruce, open your Settings by selecting the Gear Icon on the home screen. Select Teammates, and then click the Invite Teammates button in the upper right-hand corner.

On the Spruce mobile app, open your Settings. Then select Teammates, and click on the "+" icon in the upper right-hand corner.
Enter your teammate's email address and mobile phone number and select Invite.

Teammate Invite Experience

Inviting a teammate automatically generates an email from Spruce (support@sprucehealth.com) that will say, "You've been invited to join [Practice Name] and a button that says "Accept Invite". New teammates should wait to receive this email and select Accept Invite either on mobile or their computer. If they do not see this email, please have them search Spruce, support@sprucehealth.com or check their spam folder. They cannot join your practice as a teammate by downloading the app directly from the app store. See image below.

Managing teammates with Teams Feature

Teams allow you to group together multiple teammates so that they can be paged as a group, assigned conversations, receive calls, and view all of the same inboxes/filters at the same time. For example, you might have multiple front desk staff members who should be receiving the same notifications. You can easily accomplish this by making them all part of one Team called "Front Desk Staff." This previously was called "User Groups".

When you add teammates to the specific Team this will set it up so those specific teammates get page notification when this team is paged. You can also add a Team to a Ring Group or Number to Ring list to forward calls to their number. If your organization uses Spruce membership management you can add a team to have default membership just like you add an individual.

When someone is added to a Team they will automatically have a new Team inbox filter added to their Inbox view. For example someone added to the Team "Front Desk Staff" would see a mailbox called "Assigned to Front Desk Staff." Conversations assigned to the team would appear in that mailbox.

Teammates can belong to multiple "Teams", and Administrators of your organization on Spruce can add and delete teammates from these "Teams". Manage your groups in your Settings, under Teams. Please note that this option will appear only once you have added teammates to your Spruce account. Learn more about alerting and paging members in a team.

Everyone can view a list of your current Teams on the Teams tab in your Settings, but only Administrators can make changes to the Teams.

If you are an Administrator on your Spruce account, you can:

Create new Teams.
Add and remove members from existing Teams.
Rename existing Teams.

To create a new Team:

Select Teams in your settings.
Select the "+" icon on your phone or click the "Create New Team" button on the web.
Choose the name of your Team and select "Save," if you're on your phone.
Choose the members you'd like to add and select "Save."

Managing Administrators

Certain sensitive options within your Settings on Spruce are restricted so that only designated Administrators have access. These restricted activities include:

Inviting new teammates
Removing teammates from your account
Selecting a paid plan if you are a new customer
Changing billing information
Creating Spruce Links
Edit the owner of phone numbers and Spruce Links

Who is an Administrator?

The first person to join Spruce in your account is designated an Administrator by default. As the first Administrator, you can promote other teammates to Administrator status. Follow these steps to change a teammate's Administrator status:

Log in to Spruce and navigate to your Settings.
Select Teammates.
Select the three-vertical-dot menu icon to the right of a teammate's name if you're on web, or click directly on their name if you're on your phone, to show the option to promote or demote a teammate to and from Administrator status.

Please note that only Administrators can promote and demote other teammates to and from Administrator status. If you need help changing who is an Administrator on your account, please message our Support team through the app.

This article covers the Spruce functions that are unique to administrators.

Removing a teammate

Only Administrators have the ability to remove teammates from your account. This can be done on the Spruce web or mobile apps. If you are an Administrator, follow these steps to remove a teammate from your Spruce account:

Navigate to your Settings.
Select Teammates.
Select the teammate you wish to remove and scroll down to select the red button that reads Deactivate Account.
This will open a box prompting you to "transfer ownership" to a team or teammate.

Spruce will transfer assigned conversations, scheduled messages, conversation membership, phone numbers or spruce links owned by the deactivated user, Ring Groups and saved messages to the designated team or teammate. This simplifies the process for the administrator significantly as these steps do not need to be done manually. If you are uncertain who to choose as the recipient of the transfer you can create a new team to act as a vessel until another decision is made.

Note: We do not remove the teammate’s phone number from any ring groups / numbers to ring lists if listed as a direct phone number.

After you select the recipient for the teammate's resources, you will see this final screen asking you to confirm deactivation of the teammate's account. Please note that this will revoke their access immediately.

Once you've removed a teammate, it's important to ensure that their personal cell phone number is not included in any Call Forwarding / Numbers to Ring lists that your organization has set up; otherwise, the old teammate may still be able to receive calls. Visit our Call Forwarding article for instructions on how to add and remove numbers from these lists.

Starting a team conversation

Once your teammates have joined your organization, you can start a team conversation for secure internal chat.

To start a new team conversation, select the the Team icon on the bottom of your app home screen. If you're on the web then select Team on the left-hand side of your screen between Inbox and Pages. Note this will only be available if you have more than one teammate on your account.
Select the "+" icon and then "New Team Conversation" on your phone, or the blue new-conversation icon at the top of your inbox if you're on web. Click on "Team Conversation" from the drop down menu.

Add the members you'd like to include, and set a subject. Compose a message and send it. All of the teammates you chose will see this message appear in their Team inbox.

Unlike patient conversations, which by default are accessible to all teammates, only teammates who have been added to a team conversation can access that conversation and the messages exchanged therein.

You can add teammates to existing team conversations at any time. Please note that any teammates you add at a later date will be able to see all previous messages exchanged.

Here’s a video demonstrating how to start a team conversation