Patient Portal Privacy

Providers have a responsibility to maintain their patients’ privacy. In some situations, providers may deem it necessary to withhold sensitive information from the patient’s family. For example, in the case of a minor being prescribed birth control, a provider may choose not to disclose that information to the patient’s parents. MediTouch now provides an option for providers to identify clinical records as Portal Private. Setting an encounter or an individual record as private prevents them from displaying on the Patient Portal. These private encounters and records are excluded from the portal entirely regardless of who logs into the portal account – the patient or the proxy user (parent).

Set an Encounter as Private

• The Portal Private feature is only accessible to rendering providers and super users.
• To mark an encounter as private, select the Portal Private checkbox.
• The checkbox to enable the clinical summary on the Patient Portal before signing is disabled and cannot be selected unless you deselect the Portal Private option.
• To disable portal privacy, you must be a super user or a rendering provider; however, you do not have to be the same person who enabled the privacy.

• When viewing the table of encounters, indicates that the encounter is private. indicates that the encounter is not private and can be viewed on the Patient Portal.
• You cannot enable or disable the encounter’s privacy by clicking this icon (whether it is red or grey). When you click this icon, you are navigated to the encounter summary where you can mark the encounter as private or not by using the Portal Private checkbox.

When you enable an encounter as private, this privacy setting automatically applies to the records that are created as part of the encounter, (e.g., medications prescribed during a private encounter inherit the privacy and, therefore, are also private). The following types of records inherit privacy when an encounter is marked as private:

• Documents
• Medication List
• Problem List
• Orders
• Medical History
• Social History
• Surgical History

Set Individual Records as Private

Individual records in a chart can be cleared of the privacy setting even if the associated encounter is marked as private. Conversely, an individual record can be marked as private even if the associated encounter is not marked as private. The same types of records that inherit privacy from the associated encounter can be individually marked or unmarked as private.

• Unlike encounters, you can click to clear the portal privacy setting.
• Click to change the icon color to red, which indicates that the record is private.

• Social History is the exception. It has its own Portal Private checkbox. When selected, everything on the page is marked as private.
• Deselect the checkbox to disable portal privacy.

Exporting Patient Records

• Any clinical or CCDA information that you print or download from the EHR contains all of the patient’s records regardless of whether certain encounters or records are marked private.
• Remove any sensitive information that you do not want to share with the patient’s family before providing print or electronic records to them.

• The Print Wizard includes a warning message indicating that printing the patient’s clinical information includes all records, including private ones.