Patient portal

The Patient Portal gives your patients a secure, self-service window into their own care — appointments, visit history, lab results, prescriptions, bills and online payment — from any browser under the /my area of your hospital’s site. It runs on the same patient chart your clinicians use, so what a patient sees is always live, never a copy, and every action they take is logged.

Where to find it

Patients reach the portal at /my after signing in (for example /my/appointments, /my/results, /my/bills). Staff administer it from the back office under:

• HMS Core → Configuration → Requests → Appointment Requests — booking requests patients submit from the portal, queued for the front desk to confirm.
• HMS Core → Configuration → Requests → Refill Requests — prescription-refill requests raised from the portal.
• HMS Core → Configuration → Consents → Signatures — digital consent signatures captured online.
• HMS Core → Configuration → Operations → Audit Log — the per-patient activity trail of everything done on the portal.
• HMS Core → Configuration → Operations → Teleconsult Tokens — one-time tokens that admit a patient to a video consultation.

What patients can do

Once enabled, a signed-in patient can:

• Book and manage appointments — request a new appointment, view upcoming and past appointments, and cancel one.
• See visit history — open a list of past visits and drill into the detail of any one.
• View lab results — see released results and open an individual result; download can be turned off per hospital.
• Manage prescriptions — review current prescriptions and submit a refill request.
• Pay bills — open outstanding bills, see line detail, and pay online — including by M-Pesa STK Push straight to their phone — then see the payment history.
• Track their place in the queue — when queue display is enabled, see a live queue position that refreshes on its own.
• Handle consents and documents — review consents, sign them digitally, and download their secure documents.
• Follow their own health record — view vitals trends, care plans, immunisation history and insurance cover, and update their profile.

Capability map — feature to route

Each portal capability is served by a fixed /my route and, where it is optional, governed by a feature toggle. Use this map to confirm what a patient should see and which switch controls it.

How to enable the portal

The portal ships with feature toggles so you can switch capabilities on or off per hospital. To bring it up:

1. Install the Patient Portal module. Its dependencies (the consultation, pharmacy, laboratory and billing modules) provide the data the portal surfaces.
2. Give each patient a portal login. A patient must have a linked contact with portal access before /my shows their record.
3. Set the feature toggles to match your policy. The portal reads four switches:
   • Online booking — lets patients submit appointment requests.
   • Result download — allows downloading of released lab results.
   • Refill requests — allows prescription-refill requests.
   • Bill pay on portal — exposes the online bill-payment flow.
   All four ship enabled by default.
4. If you want online payment, install the M-Pesa module and configure your shortcode so the portal’s Pay button can raise an STK Push. For live queue position and the in-portal STK payment flow, install the portal’s world-class extension.
5. Review and confirm the portal requests that arrive under HMS Core → Configuration → Requests as part of front-desk and pharmacy routine.

Feature toggle reference

Back-office configuration menus

Everything patients do on the portal surfaces as a record staff manage from the back office. These are the exact menus where portal activity is reviewed and administered.

The public website

The portal is the signed-in, private area. Alongside it the suite provides a public hospital website for visitors who are not yet patients — a branded site presenting the hospital, its departments, doctors and services, with a public booking form. A new-visit booking made on the public site creates a request the front desk picks up, just like a portal booking. The website is per-hospital themeable, and a JSON storefront interface is available for facilities that prefer to run a custom front end while still booking into the same back office.

Security of patient access

Patient access is locked to the individual patient and audited end to end:

• Record isolation — record rules ensure a signed-in patient can only ever see records linked to their own patient file. There is no way to step from one patient’s portal to another’s.
• Server-side enforcement — the portal resolves the current patient on every request and refuses anything not linked to them; visibility is enforced on the server, not merely hidden in the page.
• Full audit trail — every portal action (viewing a result, requesting a refill, signing a consent, paying a bill) is written to the per-patient activity log under HMS Core → Configuration → Operations → Audit Log.
• Digital consent — consents are signed online and stored as signature records under Configuration → Consents → Signatures, giving a defensible record of what the patient agreed to and when.
• Scoped teleconsult tokens — video consultations are admitted with one-time tokens rather than shareable links.

Administering all of this — toggles, request review, consent revocation and audit-log inspection — is the job of the HMS Portal / Manager role, which is the group you grant to staff who run the portal.

Roles & access

Tips & troubleshooting

Related

• BridgeERP HMS Suite — the suite overview.
• Billing — the bills and payments the portal exposes.
• Reception — where portal appointment requests are confirmed.
• Laboratory — where the results patients see are released.