Patient portal for existing patients?

Day-to-Day Users
#1

How have people been using the patient portal for existing patients? Is there a way for them to also self-register on the site? If there is, I’m not seeing it.

The practice I’m working with is looking to allow existing patients (1000s of them, potentially) to use the portal for things like scheduling, document review, etc., and are wondering how others have done this in OpenEMR. As far as I can tell, we would need to enable them for the patient portal, make sure there’s a trusted email address, and then create credentials. Is this correct? Or are there other ways this is happening?

Really looking forward to getting this implemented. I’m still working on some of the stuff with documents and categories and what not. Some of the information on this forum and in other places has been great as I’ve tried to sort some of that out. Thanks!

#2

Hi @midder
You are precisely correct in your estimation of how a portal might be used. And detailed instructions to OpenEMR’s portal are in fact available.

The OpenEMR wiki is a rich resource for all things OpenEMR. Unfortunately, many forum users have never heard of it, and too many of those who know about it have despaired of ever learning how to find anything in its grotesquely convoluted innards…
But there is a trick: go to the User Manual page and look for the docs you’re interested in.
https://www.open-emr.org/wiki/index.php/OpenEMR_Wiki_Home_Page#User_Manuals

But let me cut short your search. Your first question is answered here:
https://www.open-emr.org/wiki/index.php/HOWTO_Activate_a_Patient's_portal_access_-_v6.0
the 2nd one here:
https://www.open-emr.org/wiki/index.php/HOWTO:_Patient_self-registration_in_the_Native_Patient_Portal_v6.1

Hope that’s helpful.
Best- Harley

1 Like
#3

Thanks for this. That’s helpful.

However I’m still not seeing a way for an existing patient to be able to register themselves in the portal. It seems like we need to do it from within the EMR and then present to them the credentials? Am I correct here?

#4

correct @midder , would be a nice feature to have an email credentials button for sending to the already created person

can also search the wiki from the bottom of every page
Screenshot from 2022-06-11 09-16-03

#5

Existing patients are not allowed to register themselves in the portal. If so, anyone could potentially access any patient chart in openemr. That is too risky.

The way to do it, is to enable the portal in the patient chart manually, generate a password, then send it to the patient with instructions on how to access their chart, using the system-generated password.

The specific steps on how to do this, are in the wiki as listed by Harley above

Allowing new potential patients to self-register for the purpose of generating a new patient chart in openemr is a different concept. What you are doing is allowing the generation of a completely empty chart, with no identifiable personal health information/data. During the first visit, there is the collection of insurance cards, state IDs etc, to verify the identity of the person/patient.

I hope this helps.

#6

Understood. Thank you both.