The short answer
Build the three things people contact you about most: booking or changing appointments, requesting repeat prescriptions, and asking a non-urgent question. Everything else is secondary and most portals would be better for having less in them.
Get access control right before any of it, because it is the part that is hard to change later.
What patients actually use
- Booking, changing and cancelling appointments
- Requesting repeat prescriptions
- Sending a non-urgent message and getting a reply
- Seeing what appointments are coming up
- Updating their own contact details
Adding more rarely increases usage and frequently makes the core tasks harder to find. A portal doing five things well beats one doing thirty adequately.
Clinical results need care
Showing results directly to patients is increasingly expected and needs thought about timing and context. A result released before the clinician has reviewed it can cause avoidable distress.
| Approach | Trade-off |
|---|---|
| Release immediately | Fast, risks distress without context |
| Release after clinician review | Safer, adds delay |
| Release with explanatory context | Better, needs content per result type |
| Withhold until an appointment | Safest, frustrates people |
This is a clinical governance decision rather than a product one, and it should be made by the people accountable for it.
Access and proxy access
- Verify identity properly at registration, not just an email address.
- Provide proxy access for carers and parents, with a clear process.
- Handle the transition when a child reaches the age where access changes.
- Allow proxy access to be revoked quickly.
- Log all access, proxy included, with who and when.
Proxy access is where most portals are weakest, and it is what carers need most. The transitions, in particular, are frequently unhandled and cause real problems.
Do not remove the phone
A portal should reduce routine contact so staff have time for the contact that matters. A portal that traps people who need a person damages the relationship it was meant to improve.
Keep a clear route to a human, and make it obvious. Measure whether routine contact falls rather than whether total contact does.