Ask lets you get a number out of the practice by typing a question instead of finding the right report and setting its filters.
What it is, and what it is not
It is the reporting engine with a different front door. You type "how much did we take last month"; it matches your words to one of the reports the product already has, runs that report, and shows you the answer with a table beneath it.
It is not an AI assistant, and nothing you type leaves this server. There is no language model involved — not ours, not anybody's. Your question is matched against each report's keywords, the best match wins, and the report runs exactly as it would if you had opened it from the Reports tab. The brief pause before an answer appears is the report running.
That distinction matters more here than it would elsewhere. A question about your practice is a question about your clients, and a product that sent it to a third party would need a business associate agreement with whoever received it. This one has nothing to send.
What you can ask
Anything one of the reports answers. If a question matches nothing, Ask says so rather than guessing — an answer built from a report that was not really about your question is worse than no answer.
Two habits make it work better:
- Name the thing you mean. "Outstanding balances" finds the report about money owed; "money" on its own is a word that appears in several.
- Say the period if you care about it. Without one you get the report's own default range, which is not always the one you had in mind.
What comes back
An answer, and the table it came from. The table is the same data the report produces, so a figure you want to check is checkable — you are never asked to take a number on trust.
Who can use it
Ask runs a report, so it obeys exactly the permissions the reports do. A clinician sees what their reports would show them and no more; a role with no reporting access has no Ask either. Asking a question is not a way around a permission.
Taking it away
The answer table can be downloaded, and the same rule applies as everywhere else in the product: running a report is looking, and exporting it creates a file of protected health information outside the system. Reports that identify clients need the export permission on top of the permission to run them.