Patient Portal - Using the Portal to Generate a Clinical Summary On the Fly

This article addresses a requirement of CURES Act, specifically the Interoperability and Patient Access final rule requiring that all patients be provided access to all the health information in their electronic medical records without charge by their healthcare provider beginning November 2nd, 2020. This is a relatively simple task to accomplish.

Let's break down what you'll need to do as a provider.

• You'll need to have our Patient Portal set up. You can read more about the Patient Portal here.

• You'll need to ensure the Patient has a Portal User set up, which allows them to access the Patient Portal and their health records.

• You will then need to ensure the Patient has been given their Username and Password, a URL to your Patient Portal, and directions on how to access.

From there, the patient will need to follow these instructions.

First, from the patient's chosen web-ready device (phone, tablet, computer, etc.), they will navigate to your Patient Portal URL. They will see this web page:

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The patient will then enter their provided Username and Password into the appropriate fields under Sign In, and then click/tap the Log In button. This will take the patient to their Summary page.

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Once you've loaded the Summary Page, any patient records that this Portal User can view will be located in the navigation bar, as indicated in the screenshot above. Click or tap the patient record you'd like to access.

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From here, the patient has access to a variety of information for your practice, such as any EHR Forms you've sent for the patient, their demographic details, appointments. To access a patient's Clinical Summary, we'll want to click or tap on the Health Records tab, shown in the screenshot above.

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The Health Records tab contains all Clinical Summaries that have been generated previously as CCDA documents which a patient can then view or download or send to another doctor as they need. To generate a new Clinical Summary on the fly, the patient will want to navigate to the "Clinical" sub tab, as shown in the above screenshot.

The Clinical Tab will first display the Filter and Apply button until you set a date range and click Apply. This will capture Clinical information from the MacPractice database for the set date range. If you scroll down, you'll notice a section for CCDA Options:

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This is where the patient can Create a CCDA. First, you'll set the Date of Service if you're only looking for a Clinical Summary from a specific date, or you can just leave it set to All to capture everything in the applied date range. If you want to limit to not include certain information in a Clinical Summary, you can uncheck the info you'd like to exclude.

Clicking the Create CCDA button will generate the Clinical Summary, which will be located in the My Docs tab. Every time you click it, a new Summary will be generated, so advise the patient not to spam this button!

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From here, you can View the Clinical Summary, Send to a Doctor, or Download.

The Download button will allow you to download it in HTML, XML, or XSL formats.