Patient Portal? Yes, please.

What do online banking, social media, and healthcare have in common? They all provide 24/7 access to personal information.

In healthcare, a patient portal is a secure website that gives patients convenient access to personal health information from anywhere, at any time.

Using a secure username and password, patients can view their health information, such as medical visit summaries, medication lists, immunizations, known allergies, and lab/test results. Many patient portals also allow users to securely message their healthcare provider, request or schedule an appointment, request prescription refills, make payments, and complete forms.

Patient portals were introduced in the late 1990s and gained widespread use about a decade later. The principal driver of today’s patient portal development is a result of “meaning use,” which began in 2011, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Meaningful use defines minimum US government standards for electronic health records, outlining how clinical patient data should be exchanged between healthcare providers, between providers and insurers, and between providers and patients.

Create a Patient Portal

Contact your healthcare provider or visit their website to create an online portal account. Any active patient can register for and use a patient portal. If authorized, a family access account can be created that will allow the user to access selected family members’ health information.

Portal benefits

A patient portal gives individuals more control of their healthcare, providing instant access to personal health information. It optimizes provider-patient communication with direct messaging capability and can provide appointment reminders and alerts.

Horizon Health offers free patient portal access to new and established patients. To learn more, visit MyHorizonHealth.org/PatientPortal or call the clinical informatics team at 217-466-4555.