A patient texts you on Sunday night to ask whether Thursday is at 10 or 10:30, and which door to use. The answer was in the confirmation they got three weeks ago. The patient calendar gives them somewhere to look that is always current.
Where patients find it
It lives at /me. A patient signs in with the account you approved (see Portal invites) and lands on Your care calendar, with one card per connected patient record and an Open appointments button on each. A signed-out visitor is sent to log in and returned to the page they asked for. Nothing appears until you connect an account to a patient, and the portal itself is optional: patients can still use your booking link and forms without it.
The left sidebar has Overview, Appointments and Help. Help opens a short patient-facing guide at /me/docs covering how to view dates, book times and cancel.
What the calendar shows
The page is titled Appointments, with the patient's name under it and two counts at the top, Next and Recent. Below it are two lists:
- Upcoming appointments, soonest first: confirmed and held visits that haven't ended. Each shows the service, the date and start and end time, the facility and a status.
- Recent appointments, newest first: completed, cancelled and missed visits, plus confirmed visits whose time has passed.
- A Next visit panel beside them with the soonest service, time and facility, or Nothing scheduled if there isn't one.
Each list loads ten at a time, with Load more upcoming and Load more recent buttons under them. The mini calendar on the side marks every day with a visit, including months beyond the first page, and picking a day narrows both lists to it; clearing the date brings them back.
Arrival notes and time zones
Times are shown in the facility's own time zone, which is what the appointment is booked in. If the patient's stored time zone is different, the card adds a line such as: Shown above in Los Angeles practice time. That's Fri, Oct 17, 1:00 PM in your timezone. A patient who has traveled doesn't have to do the arithmetic.
Upcoming visits also show the arrival notes saved on the facility, when there are any: parking, entrance and other notes, each on its own line. A facility with none shows nothing extra. The same notes appear on the public booking confirmation screen, so patients see one set of directions in both places.
Kept apart by practice
A sign-in can be linked to more than one practice, or to more than one patient record at the same practice, for example a parent and a child. Each practice has its own space at /me/your-practice, so Practice A never sees Practice B. When only one record is linked at a practice, patients go straight to its Appointments page; when there are several, they first choose which calendar to open.
A sign-in with no link gets a plain message that the practice needs to connect it. A staff member who opens /me with their own account is told it is a staff sign-in and given a link to the practice app, so nobody ends up on an empty page wondering what happened.
What stays out of it
The calendar is for logistics. Session notes, charts and other clinical records are denied to a patient account whatever else it can see, and a patient can only read appointments for the record they are linked to. Patients can't create their own access, either.
Other parts of the same page have their own posts: the Forms in the portal banner, Booking from the portal, Invoices in the portal, Pay now and Saved cards. Cancelling a visit online is covered in Prepaid appointments, and the text-reminder consent panel in SMS consent.