Patient Portals make it easy for your patients to book appointments online. They are simple to set up and can be easily added to your current website or digital systems. You can set up multiple portals with different appointment types and settings for various needs, such as website scheduling or event sign-ups. The system intelligently connects new and existing patient portals, ensuring a seamless experience for your office and its patients.

In this documentation, we’ll step through the Portals feature, one page at a time.

Filter Portal Results

The Patient Portals page is where you can create, edit, preview, or delete patient portals. The toolbar includes:

Here, you can view your Patient Portals. Each table row includes the following information:

Viewing a portal:

Clicking “View portal" will allow you to see the portal and its layout as it would appear on the Landing Page.

If you select “Delete portal” it will activate a popup warning to delete all links to this portal from extraneous websites or social media. The portal does not truly get deleted, you just no longer have access to its settings. Unlinking it elsewhere prevents people from accessing a useless portal that isn't being managed.

Edit Existing/New Patient Portal

This page allows you to customize how the scheduler will display to the patients on the landing page.

Note: if it is not letting you save in the patient portal, be sure all necessary fields are filled in, including the "Confirmation Page" default.

To add a new Patient Portal, click the +Add button in the top right corner. You can select "New Patient Portal" or "Existing Patient Portal." If you're unsure of which one to use, click the "? How to pick?" icon to learn more about each one.

Each portal includes several configuration options so you can tailor it to how your office operates. Below is an explanation of what each setting controls and when you might want to use it.

Name
Allows you to rename the portal for internal use.
By default, portals are titled “Untitled Portal.” The name is not visible to patients and is only used to help your team distinguish between multiple portals.

Allow Same-Day Scheduling
Enables patients to book appointments for the same day they are scheduling.
Turn this on if your office accepts same-day appointments; leave it off if you require advance booking.

Schedule Appointments Directly Into the Schedule (New Patient Portal only)
Determines whether appointments are booked automatically or submitted as requests.

Future Scheduling Limit
Lets you control how far into the future patients can book appointments.

Enable this setting and specify a number of days if you want to prevent scheduling too far ahead.

Show Email & SMS Consent Opt-In (New Patient Portal only)
This setting allows patients to explicitly consent to receiving text messages and emails from your office during scheduling. It is required for 10DLC messaging compliance and ensures you have proper permission before sending reminders, forms, or other communications. To enable this on the New Patient Portal, check the box, enter your Privacy Policy URL, optionally test the link, and click Save.

Allow Inactive Patients to Schedule (Existing Patient Portal only)
Allows patients marked as inactive in your EHR to book appointments through the portal.
Enable this if you want inactive patients to self-schedule without manual reactivation.

Enable Fallback Appointment Types (Existing Patient Portal only)
Controls whether the portal follows fallback appointment rules set up for providers.
Turn this on if you want existing patient scheduling to honor fallback logic when preferred appointment types aren’t available.

Birthday Field Options (New Patient Portal only)
Controls how date of birth is collected during scheduling.
You can choose to require it, make it optional, or remove the field entirely based on your intake workflow.

Use the search box to find and select any appointment type you want to make available in this portal.

Once added, you can click and hold the two-dot icon to the left of the appointment type name to drag and reorder how appointments appear on the portal.

To remove an appointment type, click the X on the right side of the appointment.

Check this if you want to hide the professional name from the appointment selection list. In most cases, offices would only use this option if they only plan on having 1 doctor available on this link.

Here is where you can upload or delete your company logo from the Landing page. There is also a hexadecimal scaled color editor for your primary color and background color.

Offices can choose to add flavor text, slogans, or a welcome message to add brand identity to the landing page. This text is displayed on the portal underneath the office logo.

This text is displayed on a confirmation page after the patient schedules their appointment. This could be a thank you, word of encouragement, or even to announce eagerness to begin/continue the patient's healing journey. It's also a good place to include follow-up information, such as an appt confirmation timeline, or contact information if the patient has questions.

Insert Placeholders: Allows you to insert placeholders for first/last name, email, or phone into the portal.

To get the most out of the portal feature, you should link any new or existing patient portal to a portal of the opposite type. Use the dropdown tab to select a portal to link from a list of portals your office has created.

Depending on which portal you are editing, this section will be titled “New” or “Existing.” You can only have one portal link selected here at a time. Although, multiple portals can link to this one. If the portal is unlinked, you will see a warning.

If you don't have a portal created of the opposite kind, new or returning, the input fields will be disabled, and a “create a portal” link will appear below the field.

Warning: If you do not see the “Link to x patient portal” field, you may have to request that this feature be turned on.

This is the Link to copy and paste into congruent New/Existing patient portals for maximum patient accessibility. When linking this portal to another, it is helpful to just copy it to paste later.

Tip:

To embed a portal on your website, copy the embed code and paste it into your site. You or your website professional can add this code to the appropriate page on your website.

If this is specifically for a Highlevel page, click the check box then copy to provide it to their team.

Click here to learn about embedding in a Highlanding page.

When new patients access the scheduler, they face this Landing Page. Several settings on the Edit Existing/New Patient portal Page determine the way this landing page ( And all landing pages) looks.

Key Features:

For new patients, we have them schedule the appointment before giving login/authentication information, as new patients are more likely to schedule their appointments if they see the calendar first.

Key elements:

This is an error/retry screen of the 1st New Patient Landing page. At the top of the page lies an error message denoting that the user must choose another time slot. Whenever there is a conflict in scheduling a new patient, the patient will be directed to this alternate Landing Page.

This could happen for two reasons:

When an existing patient accesses the scheduler, we have them authenticate with their name and email/phone number first. By doing this, we make it easier for returning patients to book appointments because they will be shown personalized times that match their previous preferences.

The way this landing page ( And all landing pages) looks is determined by Several settings on the Edit Existing/New Patient portal Page.

Key Features:

Patient Fields:

New patient Linking:

Suppose a new patient still attempts to authenticate in the existing patient portal. In that case, our system will discover that no records exist for that patient, and activate a popup to allow them to switch to a new patient portal, while carrying over any compatible information to save the patient time.

After successful authentication, the existing patient will be shown a calendar of available days to schedule an appointment, as well as a few separate times an appointment could be scheduled. SKED uses the patient’s previous preferences to provide convenient scheduling time frames for selection.

Key Features:

After a patient successfully authenticates and schedules an appointment, they are faced with this Patient Portal confirmation Page. This page’s layout is determined by Several settings on the Edit Existing/New Patient portal Page

Key Elements: