As labs move further upstream and engage more directly with patients, it follows that the boundaries of the traditional LIS should also expand outwards. Dendi’s Patient Portal represents an extension of the LIS, allowing Patients to register themselves and access results directly. Ultimately this saves labs and doctors time and effort; labs especially are able to dedicate more towards collecting and testing, and less towards having to report results out.

Enabling the Patient Portal

The Patient Portal requires an additional subscription beyond that of the one for Dendi LIS. Please contact your Dendi account representative to discuss enabling the Patient Portal for your lab.

Instructions for Patients on Registering and Navigating the Patient Portal

Everything written prior to this section is for internal users (lab staff) only. Please refer to the separate document Dendi LIS Documentation - Patient Portal (for Patients) for instructions on registering and using the Patient Portal that can be shared with your Patients.

Administrative Functionality

With the Patient Portal enabled, there are a few things that LIS administrators can do to control various features: specify which Accounts are available for Patients to directly associate themselves with, manage individual Patient user logins, and decide whether to let Patients manage their own insurance information or not.

Managing Accounts Available in the Patient Portal

Within the Patient Portal, Patients will be able to directly associate themselves with one or more Accounts. For reasons related to security and competitiveness, you may want to only show a few specific Accounts as choices to your Patients. You may also want to create exclusive registration links for particular Accounts. This can be controlled for each Account in the field Patient Portal Account Options:

• By default (“None”), Accounts will not be shown on the registration page for the Patient Portal.
• Selecting “Show Account in public Patient registration page” allows anybody to register under that Account.
• Selecting the “Exclusive Account registration page” will generate a unique link for registration specific to & exclusive to this Account. Accounts with this checked will not show up in the dropdown for the main Patient Registration page.

Control & Manage Individual Patient Access

By default, when Patients register themselves in the system, they will have to create a login with their email address and a password. Upon logging in, Patients can change their email addresses or passwords. LIS administrators are able to create user logins, change email addresses, or even disable access for individual Patients.

From the Patient Details page for a given Patient, you can manage whether a Patient can access the Dendi Patient Portal from the “Patient can access Dendi Patient Portal” checkbox.

For Patients that don’t yet have a login, you can create one for them by entering in an email address and checking the box for “Patient can access Dendi Patient Portal”. Doing so will send a confirmation message with a temporary password and a confirmation link to the Patient’s email, and once they have confirmed they will be able to access the Patient Portal.

Note: Whenever the Patient email is changed, another confirmation message & temporary message will be sent out to the new email. The Patient will temporarily be unable to access the Patient Portal until they reconfirm.

Create Patient Portal User Logins Through Bulk Create

Internal users (lab staff) with access to the Patient Portal can use the Patient Bulk Create feature in Dendi to create logins for Patients en masse. Patients needing access to the Dendi Patient Portal should have an "x" value written in the column "Patient can access Dendi Patient Portal", as well as unique and valid email addresses provided. If a Patient does not need access, leave the “Patient can access Dendi Patient Portal” column blank.

After a successful upload of the Bulk Create file, confirmation emails with temporary passwords will be sent to Patients. They will be able to log in after clicking on the confirmation email link.

Note: Bulk Create functionality for internal and external users differs slightly, as only internal users can create Patient Portal logins through Bulk Create.

For more information on how to create Patients in bulk, please refer to Dendi LIS Documentation - Groups.

Patient Portal Management UI

The Patient Portal Management UI is available under the Admin Tools navigation menu. From here, you can control various elements of the Patient Portal in order to have more fine-tuned control over this critical feature for your business.

Managing Mandatory and Optional Fields

You can control what fields are mandatory or optional to Patients when they are registering themselves or updating their information post-registration. Note that some fields are always mandatory; they are denoted in the system with greyed-out rows.

Allowing Patients to Self-Manage Insurance Information

You can enable Patients to add or manage their own insurance information. If turned on, this will allow Patients to input their own insurance, even up to the point of adding Payers in your system that weren’t already there.

Note: we at Dendi recommend keeping this option turned off, as this way you will be able to better manage/curate your Payer list.

Controlling Patients’ Ability to Delete Uploaded Files

When Patients can delete uploaded files is turned on, Patients will be able to not only upload their files and see uploaded files but will also be able to delete uploaded files. Toggling this setting to off will still allow Patients to upload and see files, just simply remove their ability to delete uploaded files.