Custom patient portal development

When a practice needs more than its EHR’s portal

If you run a practice on a major electronic health record system, you probably already have a patient portal. Epic’s MyChart, athenahealth’s patient portal and the client portals in tools like SimplePractice and Jane handle the basics well, and for many practices they are enough.

A custom patient portal starts to make sense when the built-in one does not match how you work. Common reasons include:

• Your intake process has steps the EHR forms cannot handle, such as photos, conditional questions or consent forms specific to your treatments.
• You run programs, memberships or packages that the EHR has no concept of, common in med spas, weight management, physical therapy and wellness clinics.
• You are a telehealth or health startup building a patient experience that is the product itself, not an add-on to a clinic.
• You use several systems, for example an EHR, a booking tool and a payment tool, and patients have to log into each one.
• You want the portal to look and feel like your brand rather than your software vendor’s.

Features of custom patient portal software

• Online booking, rescheduling and cancellation, with reminders by text and email.
• Digital intake and consent forms completed before the visit, with signatures.
• Secure messaging between patients and staff, kept inside the portal rather than in email.
• Document sharing for care plans, lab results your team uploads, and visit summaries.
• Online bill pay, saved payment methods and membership billing through an established processor.
• Program tracking, such as progress check-ins, home exercise plans or treatment schedules.
• Family or caregiver access, with the patient’s permission and separate logins.

Privacy and HIPAA come first

A patient portal handles protected health information, so if your practice is a HIPAA covered entity, the portal must meet the HIPAA Security Rule. There is no official HIPAA certification for software. Compliance depends on how the software is built, how it is hosted and how your practice uses it.

We build patient portals with the safeguards HIPAA expects in mind: individual logins with strong authentication, role-based access, audit logs of who viewed or changed what, encryption in transit and at rest, and hosting on infrastructure from providers that sign business associate agreements, such as AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure. We work alongside your compliance officer or advisor on the policies and agreements your practice needs. Our page on HIPAA compliant software development goes into more detail.

How the project works

1. Map the patient journeyWe follow a patient from first contact to follow-up and note every form, message and payment along the way.
2. Review data and privacyWith your compliance contact, we decide what health information the portal stores, shows and sends.
3. Design and test with staffYou and your front desk click through the patient screens and the staff side before code is written.
4. Build and connectWe build in rounds you review and connect to your EHR, scheduling or billing tools where they offer an API.
5. Launch to patientsWe start with a small group of patients, fix what they trip over, then open it to everyone.

Connecting to your EHR

Many modern EHRs offer APIs, often based on the FHIR standard, that let other software read appointments, demographics or documents with the right permissions. What is available varies a lot by vendor and by your contract with them, so we check the specific options for your system early in the project. Where no API exists, the portal can still work alongside the EHR, with staff moving information between them in a controlled way.

What a custom patient portal costs

Zoti custom projects start at $499/month, covering design, development, hosting and ongoing changes. The price depends on the features you need, the systems the portal connects to and any extra hosting and security requirements. You get a written quote before work begins.