← Caregiver glossary · Medical concepts
Also: MyChart · patient portal · EHR portal · electronic health record
A secure website (and usually app) provided by a health system that gives patients access to their medical records, lab results, appointment scheduling, prescription refills, and secure messaging with the care team. The most-used US portal is MyChart (built on Epic); other systems use Cerner/Oracle Health, Athena, NextGen, etc. — each different.
The patient portal is the patient-facing window into a health system's EHR (Electronic Health Record). Different health systems use different EHR vendors, which means different patient portals — a patient seen at one hospital system uses MyChart (Epic); another uses MyHealthOne (Cerner); another uses athenaPatient. The portals don't talk to each other. A parent treated at three different health systems has three different portal accounts.
What patient portals typically offer: • Lab and imaging results, often as soon as the clinician signs them out (sometimes faster than the clinician calls) • Visit summaries (the after-visit summary patients used to get on paper) • Chart notes from clinicians (the OpenNotes movement made these patient-accessible by default in 2021) • Secure messaging with the care team — usually 1-3 business day turnaround • Appointment scheduling and cancellation • Prescription refill requests • Bill viewing and payment • Vaccination records • Forms and questionnaires before visits
The family-caregiver gap: portals are built for the PATIENT. To access a parent's portal as a family caregiver, you typically need PROXY ACCESS — which requires the patient to set it up while they have capacity. Proxy-access policies vary by health system; some require a paper form, some allow online setup, some have age restrictions (proxy access for parents of minors often auto-terminates at the child's 18th birthday, which creates a gap for parents of disabled adult children). Once set up, proxy access typically gives the caregiver a separate login that can switch between their own record and the patient's.
Limits worth knowing: most portals don't show all records (some sensitive notes are blocked from patient view); most don't connect across health systems; most don't support bilingual content (the interface translates but the chart content stays in English); proxy access can be revoked by the patient at any time.
For multi-system patients, families often use a separate tool (Kintaria, a Google Doc, an Apple Notes file) as the canonical "family-level" record across portals. That's the gap the family-coordination layer fills that no individual portal addresses.
At every encounter ("sign up for MyChart at the front desk"). A family caregiver typically needs proxy access (set up by the patient) to view a parent's portal — see "HIPAA authorization" and ask the provider about proxy access setup.
Terms families frequently confuse with patient portal.
Patient portal is for asynchronous interactions (messaging, lab results, refills, scheduling). Telehealth is for live video/phone clinical visits. Often the portal is how the telehealth visit gets scheduled and launched, but they're different surfaces — messaging vs. real-time consultation.
Patient portal proxy access is the practical mechanism by which a family caregiver gets ongoing view of the patient's records. HIPAA authorization is the legal mechanism for releasing records to a named party — often used when a one-time records release is needed (e.g., transferring records to a new specialist) or when proxy access isn't available. Most portals require both: the proxy-access setup AND a HIPAA authorization on file.
See also: all glossary terms · conditions by name · step-by-step playbooks