A patient portal is the website or app where patients see their own health records from a clinic or hospital: test results, appointments, medicines and messages from the clinic. The information comes straight from the clinic's ambulatory EHR, so the portal is a part of the record, not a separate system. The portals described here are sold mainly with clinic records in the United States.
What can a patient do in a portal? A patient can see the results of a blood test, the list of current medicines, and the dates of past and future visits. A patient can request a repeat prescription, pay a bill, fill in forms before a visit, or send a written message to the doctor. A parent can see the records of a young child.
Here is a typical case. A 45-year-old man in Colorado has a cholesterol test on Monday morning. On Tuesday at 3 p.m., the result reaches the clinic's record. A few minutes later, the portal sends him an email saying that a new result is ready. He signs in and sees his LDL cholesterol, the "bad" cholesterol, at 162 mg/dL. The portal marks it as above the normal range of under 100. He sends his doctor a message to ask whether he needs medicine. On Wednesday, the doctor replies that he should come in to discuss it, and the portal offers him a slot.
In the United States, he may see the result before his doctor does. Federal rules against "information blocking" require clinics to release most results to patients without delay. So doctors often explain a result after the patient has already seen it.
Signing in must be safe, because health records are private. Many portals use ready-made login software, called customer identity and access management (CIAM), with a one-time code sent to the patient's phone. The portal is often the place from which a returning patient enters a hospital group's digital front door.
India has a different arrangement. Instead of one portal for each hospital, a patient can use one personal health record app linked to the ABHA number, the health ID of the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission. With the patient's consent, records from different hospitals and labs can be brought into that one app. This depends on interoperability: each hospital's record must share its data in a common format.