Patient Portal Practice Settings and Configuration

Your practice can configure what details and options appear in My Kid’s Chart, PCC’s patient portal.

Patient Portal Configuration

Use the Configuration tab of the Patient Portal Configuration tool to change or update what your patient portal users will see.

Access Controlled: Like other configuration items, the Patient Portal Configuration tool is limited to those users with an appropriate user role. Use the User Administration Tool to review your practice’s roles and control who can make changes to My Kid’s Chart.

Age Based Privacy

Set Age Based Privacy. The patient portal will automatically hide all patient records from all users when a patient reaches your practice’s defined emancipation age.Your office can grant account access to patients above this age on an account-by-account basis. For more information, including what information will still be available to the patient’s linked patient portal users, read Patient Portal User Account Administration.

Display in Patient Portal

Check the boxes in this list to set what will appear in My Kid’s Chart for all users. Configuration changes are practice-wide, for all patients and all locations.

Turned Off By Default: Care Plans and Payments, as well as patient sex, race, ethnicity, preferred language, and smoking status are not visible in My Kid’s Chart by default. Your practice can check the boxes to enable these features.

Appointment and Date of Last Physical: Displays the date of the patient’s last physical, and any upcoming appointment details. When “Allow Portal Users to Cancel Appointments” is checked, portal users can cancel upcoming appointments. Use the table below to set exceptions and prevent selected visit reasons from being cancelled or being cancelled within certain time frames. See Cancel Appointments in the Patient Portal.

Clinical Instructions: Your practice can share clinical instructions through the Patient Portal. You can add any note component to the Clinical Instructions, and they will appear in the portal. Click the “+” button to add an additional generic chart note.

Separate Configuration for the Patient Visit Summary Report: The configuration for Clinical Instructions in My Kid’s Chart is independent of the configuration for Clinical Instructions in the Patient Visit Summary Report. Read more here about configuring Clinical Instructions in the PVS.

Orders: When “Orders” is unchecked no orders will appear in the patient portal. When checked, you can select which order types should appear in the patient portal by checking the corresponding checkbox.

Personal Balance and Payments:

The Personal Balance feature is turned on for all practices by default. This feature allows patients’ families to see their outstanding balance within the portal. The Personal Balance feature must be turned on before your practice can receive payments through the patient portal.

Your practice can choose to enable auto-posting of payments made through your patient portal. You will need to select a payment type for each credit card listed, which will be used to identify portal payments in PCC reports. If you do not have an appropriate payment type option, you can add one in the Payment Types table or contact PCC Support for help. For more information, read Get Started with Patient Portal Payments.

Patient Portal Messaging

Patient Portal Messaging: If any of your Portal Messaging templates have “Display in Portal” checked, Portal Messaging will be “Enabled” here. To disable Portal Messaging, see Portal Message Template Configuration.

By default, patients can add attachments when replying to a message sent by your practice. Uncheck the “Allow portal users to send attachments when replying to messages initiated by the practice” to remove the option to add an attachment to a reply.

Portal Messaging Inactivity is the option to prevent replies to a message thread after a selected number of days. If the portal user does not send a reply within the selected number of days, the conversation will become inactive and additional replies cannot be sent. The countdown resets every time a reply is sent.

You can select any number of days, from 1 to 99. Keep in mind that selecting too short a date range can prevent users from replying at all, so select a reasonable length of time.

Configure the Practice Address that Appears in My Kid’s Chart

If your practice uses PCC’s Care Center features to manage patients for several different pediatric offices that use the same practice database, you may want to set which office address each patient portal user will see when they log into My Kid’s Chart.

Use the Practice Preferences tool to set which location address appears in the patient portal, as well as on the Health Information Summary report.

After setting this option, the patient portal and the Health Information Summary will automatically display either your practice’s default address or the patient’s care center address. If the patient has no care center assigned, they will see the practice’s default address instead.

If a parent has several patients who visit physicians at different care centers, both addresses will appear for them when they log in to My Kid’s Chart.

Configure Which Growth Charts are Visible in the Patient Portal

Your practice can control which growth charts are shown in the patient portal by checking the box within the Portal Display column in the Growth Chart Configuration tool.

By default, the same Growth Charts that you use in PCC EHR will be visible to families in the portal. You can uncheck any that you don’t want showing up in the portal, or you can decide to disable growth charts in the portal entirely by unchecking the Growth Charts option in the Patient Portal Configuration tool.

Do You Hide Vitals Now? Growth Charts Displays Them:

Your practice can specifically set whether or not to display patient vitals from each encounter in the patient portal. Growth Charts also display vitals collected by your practice. If you prefer to hide vitals information on chart notes and patient summaries, you may also wish to turn off Growth Charts.

Configure Where the Patient Portal Users Component Appears in PCC EHR

The Patient Portal Users component is added by default to the Patient Check-In protocol and to the Demographics section of the patient’s chart.

The chart-wide Patient Portal Users component can be added wherever else you need it, such as on phone notes, on the Medical Summary, or on every appropriate well visit protocol. By placing it in the context of the other work your practice does, you’ll be able to support your families better.

Use the Protocol Configuration tool to edit chart note protocols and chart sections.

Change the Default Logout Time in My Kid’s Chart

After 5 minutes of inactivity, My Kid’s Chart will log a user out. PCC can customize the logout time for your practice. Contact PCC Support for more information.

Customize the Patient Portal Message Protocol

When your practice sends or receives a patient portal message, you work with a Portal Message protocol that includes the message information.

Your practice can customize this protocol to include other tools that your staff may find useful when responding to a portal message. For example, you could add the “Recent and Upcoming Appointments” component, or the “Forms” component.

To make changes to the Portal Message protocol, open Protocol Configuration from the Configuration menu and click “Protocol Builder”. The Portal Message protocol is listed with other protocols at your practice.

You can add, delete, and edit the components that appear when you work with portal messages.

Once you add a component, it will be available to your staff on every portal message sent or received afterwards.

Turn On and Customize Patient Portal Message Templates

PCC EHR includes three optional patient portal message templates that you can use as-is, or customize to work better for your office. You can also create your own messaging templates.

To work with patient portal message templates, click on the Messaging Templates tab of the Patient Portal Configuration tool.

Note: In order to use portal messaging templates, your practice must have Secure Messaging enabled in the Configuration tab.

Highlight the template you want to turn on and click “Edit”.

Select the “Display in Portal” checkbox.

You can also choose to automatically assign incoming messages of a certain template to a specific person at your practice.

You can make additional edits to the contents of your portal messages, and you can also create your own custom message templates. For more information, read the Guide to Portal Messaging Template Configuration.