Keywords: patient portal, enrollment utility, portal invite, portal email, run utility
Summary
This article covers how to use the Patient Portal Enrollment Utility in Cloud 9 to send portal invitations to patients, including prerequisites, how to navigate the utility, and best practices for managing invite volume without hitting your email cap.
Pre-Requisites
1. User must have the permission of Run Utilities to be able to access this Utility.
2. There needs to be a letter in your Document Editor Identified as the Patient Portal Invite Email, with the appropriate merge fields for the Portal Username, Password, and URL.
NOTE: Attention to detail must be exercised when working with utilities in general, as many utilities, once run, cannot be reversed.
CAUTION: We don't recommend using the Enrollment Utility to invite your entire patient base at once. If your email service has a daily sending cap, some patients may never receive the invitation—and since there's no way to track who got it, re-running the utility risks sending duplicates rather than reaching those who were missed. Hitting your email cap will also block all outgoing emails from your practice for the rest of that day. On top of that, patients who aren't expecting the email will often call in with questions, which can put a real strain on your front desk team.
Instead, we recommend inviting patients as they're added to the system after activating your portal. Our Support team can even enable a setting that automatically prompts you to send a portal invite whenever a new patient is created; feel free to contact us so we can turn this on at your request. This approach gives your team time to get familiar with the portal before a wider rollout. If you're looking for other ways to manage invite volume, check out the additional methods covered in the article below.
Accessing the Utility
From the Cloud 9 Header bar, go to Edit > Run Utility > Patient Portal Enrollment, as shown below.
Portal Enrollment Familiarization
Using the image shown below, let's get familiar with the fields and their functions.
Taken from the Top Left, let's go through the fields and their functions:
Reload Queue: This button should be selected each time you change filters or settings, in order to reload the Queue with the proper selections.
Send Invitations: This button is cannot be clicked until all filters have been selected, patients are identified in the list, and the boxes to the left of those you want to invite have been selected. Once those three criteria have been met, this button becomes selectable.
All Active Patients and Last Name: Let's cover both of these fields at the same time, as they play off each other, based on how they are selected. As shown below, when the All Active Patients button is checked, the Last Name field is not selectable. This is simply because if you are looking for all active patients, you do not need the Last Name field to be completed. Conversely, if you want to search by a last name, the All Active Patients button cannot be checked.
If you de-select the All Active Patients button, the Last Name field can have information entered within it.
Location: The Location field, when selected, provides a dropdown list of all locations within the URL. You can select one, some, or all from this list.
Patient Status: Similar to the Location field, you can select one, some, or all patient statuses within your URL.
Last Name: If you know the patient (or family) that you wish to send a Patient Portal Invite to, enter their last name in this field, and select the Reload Queue in the top left of the screen. All those with the same last name will appear on the list.
Running the Utility
As noted in the Caution statement above, simply selecting the All Active Patients button, receiving the list below, checking all names, and selecting the Send Invitations button is not recommended. Narrowing down the field of those you wish to send invitations to is greatly preferred. You can choose to do this any way you would like. Examples include: filtering by a single location, and picking one to three patient statuses at a time. This way, you can control the number of invitations being sent. You can also make sure you send a limited number to avoid hitting your email cap.
In the image below, I have selected my location (All), my patient status (All), and selected the Last Name (see the red circle around the letter R). I want all patients in my practice with the last name starting with R. Then I clicked Reload Queue. Those with the last name starting with R are now displayed on the list. I checked the boxes to the left of their name (Outlined by the red rectangle), because I want both of them to receive the Portal Invite Email. The red arrow is pointing to the Send Invitations button, which is now unshaded, as my selections in the list below have been checked, which identifies them as the ones who need to receive the invitation.
If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to reach out to Cloud 9 Support by emailing us at cloud9support@planetdds.com . You can chat with us online using the chat bubble on the lower right at https://cloud9support.planetdds.com/hc/en-us . You can also give 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.