Keywords: patient portal, portal login email, login error
Summary
When adding a Portal Login Name to a Responsible Party, you may see: "The login name you have entered is already in use. Please enter a different login name." This means the email is already attached to another record: a duplicate, a mistake, or a conversion cleanup. This article walks you through how to find and fix it.
The Problem
To give a Responsible Party access to the Patient Portal, you must add their email in the Portal Login Email Field within the 'Edit' button of the Edit Patient > Relationships page.
Occasionally, you will go to enter and click 'Create Login' for the Patient Portal, only to get an error that says: 'The login name you have entered is already in use. Please enter a different login name.'
When you get this error, it means that another Person record is already or once was a Responsible Party for a patient and using that Email Address. Below we will review steps you can take to identify the Person record, and get it working for the Responsible Party.
Multiple Person Records for a Responsible Party
There can be different reasons why you get the error, 'The login name you have entered is already in use. Please enter a different login name'. The most common is, there could be multiple person records for that Responsible Party. Let's take a look at an example using a test patient. I am attempting to add my email address to the responsible party for Cloudy 19 Test. First, I navigate to the relationships page, then I click edit on the Father12 Test responsible party. Then I attempt to save my email address. But it comes up with the error mentioned above. (Screenshot below.)
Step 1 - Navigate to Edit > Setup > People to see if there are any duplicate Person accounts. In this example, there are four Father12 Test accounts.
Step 2 - I will label all of the accounts something different temporarily here in Edit > Setup > People. I will add a 1, 2, 3, and 4 behind the last name here, and then save the changes.
Step 3 - Now that we have numbered them, we can close the patient accounts and then reopen them to see which Person records are on which accounts. In this case though, I already have an example. We see in this other test patient, Cher Test, there is one of our duplicate accounts of Father12 Test2 that has the email for the patient portal already selected. The other test patient, Cloudy 19 Test has Father12 Test1. We have now identified which Person record has the email attached to it. (If you do not have an example readily available where the duplicate Person record is located, you can also do a search by the email address.)
Step 4 - Fixing the Problem.
Depending on the need, there are two ways to fix this. If the two patients are related, we can make sure that on Cloudy 19 Test, we change the Responsible Party from Father12 Test 1 to Father12 Test2. This means that it would be the same Person record and have the Portal Login Email set already. To do this, we would click Edit on Cloudy19 Test's Responsible Party, then use the lookup button to add the correct person account. GIF showing this process below.
NOTE: After attaching the correct Person account, make sure to go back to Edit > Setup > People and remove the numbers you added to differentiate the duplicate Person accounts.
Sometimes however, it is not a related party or the same person, but the email address was added in error to one of them. If so, continue to Step 5.
Step 5- The email was placed on the wrong Person record.
If this is not a case of multiple Person records being the same person, but maybe the name was the same and email was placed on the wrong one, you can just go into the incorrect Person record on the patient chart where they are the Responsible Party, Click Edit, remove the Portal Login Name and save the changes on the patient chart. That way, you can go back into the original patient and add the email to the correct Person Record for the Login Portal Name.
What if I can't find the Person record that is using this email address?
There may be times when you cannot find the Person record that is using the email address you need to use for the Portal Login Name. In that case, we'll review steps you can take to find and remove that Login Email Name for the Patient Portal from the incorrect patient when a search for name in Edit > Setup > People or a search by Email in the patient lookup does not yield results. For Ledger Test, I am trying to add the correct email address, but it is giving me an error. My search yielded nothing, so I will move onto the steps below.
Step 1 -When you cannot find the Person record with the Portal Login Name Email you need to use, the most efficient approach is to create a Data Miner to identify the person record. It is possible that a individual was previously associated with a patient; however, the individual has since been removed from the patient’s account but may still appear in Edit > Setup > People. The Data Miner will identify such individuals.
Step 2 - To create the Data Miner, navigate to Reports > Data Miner. (For more in depth information on how to use the data miner, see THIS ARTICLE and THIS ARTICLE.)
Step 3 - Click the blue '+Add' then select 'Person' in the View section.
Step 4 - In the View Columns section you must select the Columns of the Data Miner. For this, you will select: 'Person Full Name' and 'Responsible Portal Login'.
Step 5 - In the Filter section directly to the right of the 'View Columns', you will now select the 'Filter(s)' to filter the results. In the drop down, select 'Responsible Portal Login'. Then choose equals or begins with and enter the email address.
Step 6 - To run the report to display the results, click the 'Run' icon.
Step 7 - Now we have our Results in the screenshot below. We can see the email address is associated with Callie Test. This person record is not a patient, I checked in the search patient tool, so we've got to add it to a test account so we can take the Portal Login Name off. This Person could have been a responsible party previously for a different patient, and they were removed as the responsible party, but the Portal Login Name Email is still stuck. Let's review how to remove it. (Screenshot of Data Miner results below.)
Step 8 - We will follow the same steps as above to remove the portal login email from the incorrect account so I can add it to Ledger Test. The steps are: Open a test account then navigate to the relationships page. From the Relationships of the test account, add the Person record found in the data miner and make them financially responsible by checking the box. Then save your changes in the patient record.
After saving the changes, you can go back in and it will show the email address and you can delete it by clicking 'Reset Login'. Make sure to save the changes with the green button in the patient chart. After that is done, you can navigate to the correct patient, (Ledger Test), and add the Portal Login Name and save the changes. GIF below showing the steps.
NOTE: Be sure once you have saved the changes by resetting or deleting the login that you then go back into the test patient account to remove the financially responsible party and then delete it and save the changes.
These steps should help in different scenarios when you try to add the Portal Login Name Email Address but get the error that the login name is taken and to pick another. However, if you are having any difficulties or need further assistance, please contact Support, we would be happy to help you get it sorted if the issue persists after following these instructions.
As always, if you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to Cloud 9 Support by emailing us at cloud9support@planetdds.com, or chatting us online using the chat bubble on the lower right at https://cloud9support.planetdds.com/hc/en-us, or giving us a call during our business hours of 8:00 AM EST to 8:00 PM EST at the 1.800.394.6050 option 2.