Patient access customizes a Microsoft Power Apps portal with healthcare-specific capabilities as part of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. It provides patients with access to their health data, knowledge articles, and in-person and virtual appointment scheduling, chat with health bot, communicate with a caregiver, and view their clinical data. The portal connects with entities in Dataverse.
| Reference implementation | Description | Deploy |
|---|---|---|
| Monitoring for Patient Access | End-to-end deployment and configuration of Application Insights and Log Analytics to monitor Patient Access portal |  |
Note: The implementation of the Patient Access solution can currently not be automated, and requires manual implementation and configuration across Solution Center, Power Platform Admin Center, and portal for Power Apps. See the implementation guide for detailed instructions.
Before you deploy and configure, verify you have implemented the prerequisites.
Specifically for patient access, you need:
- Power Platform environments
- Must be created upfront, in United States with Dataverse and D365 Apps enabled
- Power Apps Portal app deployed and configured in the targeted environment(s)
This section provide prescriptive guidance with design considerations and recommendations across the critical design areas for Patient Access portal for the teams that will deploy and manage the Patient Access capabilities within the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.
- There are licensing implications with the number of loggins on the self-service portal.
- You can use local identities or centralized-managed identities for patient access.
- There are multiple identity providers for patients when accesing the self-service portal, including Azure AD B2B, Microsoft Accounts and others.
- When using Azure B2C, it requires a subscription (landing zone) in Azure that should comply with organizations compliance requirements
- Allow self-service capabilities for patients via the patient access portal.
- Those self-service capabilities include booking an appointment, searching for a practicioner, as well as review current appointments.
- Use Azure B2C to enable patients to register, sign-in, and reset password via self-service
- Have separated B2C tenants (instances) for different environments (dev, test, prod)
- Use conditional access policies with MFA for users who are accessing the Patient Access portal
- Telemetry, metrics, and logs are disabled for portal apps, and must explicitly be enabled and requires Azure Application Insights.
- Performance and scale are determined by the license add-ons for for portal apps.
- There are multiple identity providers for patients when accesing the self-service portal, including Azure AD B2B, Microsoft Accounts and others.
- Use a dedicated Azure Application Insights instance, connected with Log Analytics to capture key telemetry, metrics, and logs for the Patient Access Portal application
- Create alerts and views to monitor usage, such as logins, performance, and response time in order to make informed decision around need for additional add-on licensing.
- If Patient Access Portal application is used externally, ensure you have purchased required add-on capacity to meet expected peak
- Once provisioned, the portal will become public and will be accesible by anyone from any computer from the internet.
- Ensure portal authentication is configured to your chosen identity provider.
- Restrict portal access from a list of IP addresses and CIDR ranges to limit portal access as described on this article.
- Create required policies and flows for user sign-up if integrating the portal application with Azure AD B2C
The following instructions will guide you to how to install and configure the patient access portal in your Power Platform environment for healthcare.
- Navigate to https://make.powerapps.com and select the environment where you will deploy the Patient access scenario, and click “+Create” to create a new portal based on the “Customer self-service” template
- Give the portal a name, and provide a unique DNS name for the portal.
- Click create in order to start provisioning the portal application.
Note: an environment can have one portal of each type and for each language
- The provisioning of the portal app will take some time, and you can monitor the progress by navigating to “Apps” on the left side, which will list all the types of applications in the environment
Once the portal application has been provisioned, go to https://solutions.microsoft.com to deploy the “Patient access” scenario to your Power Platform environment.
- Select “Patient access” and deploy, and select the dedicated Power Platform environment and provide a deployment name. The deployment name will be used for all solutions you will deploy to this environment.
- On the next screen, the solution center will check for any missing pre-requisites, and allow you to include codable concepts and sample data (for test/dev environments only).
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Start the deployment of the “Patient access” solution by clicking next. This can take approximately 60 to 70 minutes to complete.
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Once the deployment has completed, you will find the solution available in the Solution Center, with recommended next steps for post-deployment configuration.
- In the Power Platform environment, you should see at least the following Healthcare applications being installed.
To complete the configuration of the portal application you created before deploying the “Patient access” solution, you must navigate to https://make.powerapps.com and change the bindings, and optionally customize the portal per your organizations requiremenents.
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Log into the environment in the maker portal, via https://make.powerapps.com and ensure you have selected the correct Environment.
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Select the portal application you created, and go to "settings". This will open a pane on the right side, where you must select “administration” to change the bindings to use the patient portal.
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Select “Update Portal Bindings”, and change from “Customer Self-Service” to “Healthcare Patient Portal. Click update and the changes will be made to the portal application.
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Once the changes are saved, access the patient access portal via its URL.
Azure Active Directory B2C provider is the preferred method for user authentication in Power Apps portals, that enables organizations to provide sign-up, login, and password reset via self service for their users/customers. Specifically for Patient Access, this will enable the patients to use their preferred social, enterprise, or local account identities to get single sign-on access to the Patient Access Portal application.
Pre-requisites:
Once you have created your Azure AD B2C tenant, you must create and register an application that must support accounts in any identity provider or organization directory for users to authenticate with user flows.
For detailed deployment instructions for Azure AD B2C setup with Portal Apps:
Once the portal has been created and configured, you must update the Healthcare administration application with the URL for your portal application.
- Find the Healthcare administration application, either directly from within the Environment in Power Platform admin center, or open the application in the https://make.powerapp.com portal. Remember to select the correct Environment context.
- The default view is the Healthcare administration. Change to “Settings” from the drop down list.
- Provide the URL for your patient access portal you created earlier, and save.
