Health TechnologyJuly 24, 2026·4 min read
By the CIRRUS Editorial Team — how we write and source this
Getting more out of your patient portal: the features most people never use
Most patients use their portal for appointment scheduling and little else. Several underused features actually do more to improve care coordination than the basics most people stick to.
Patient portals attached to electronic health record systems get used by most patients for a narrow set of basic functions — scheduling appointments, checking test results, maybe messaging a provider's office — while several features with genuine practical value for managing chronic conditions or care across multiple providers go largely unused, often because patients simply aren't aware the functionality exists.
The medication list and health summary sections, when kept current, function as a single reliable source of truth that's considerably more useful than most patients realize, particularly for anyone seeing multiple specialists who don't automatically share records with each other — printing or screen-sharing this summary at a new specialist visit, rather than relying on memory to list current medications and conditions, meaningfully reduces the risk of an incomplete or inaccurate history reaching a new provider.
Trend views for lab results — most portals display historical values for a given test as a graph or table across multiple visits, not just the most recent result in isolation — are underused despite being genuinely more clinically informative than a single isolated number, since a value trending in a concerning direction over several visits, even while still technically within a normal range, is worth noticing and can prompt a useful conversation with a physician earlier than waiting for a value to cross an official threshold.
Portal-based secure messaging with a care team, for non-urgent questions that don't require a full appointment, is often underused simply because patients default to phone calls out of habit — messaging generally produces a documented, timestamped exchange that becomes part of the medical record, which has genuine advantages for continuity of care over an undocumented phone conversation, and many practices have specific response-time commitments for portal messages worth knowing about directly from the practice.
This article is general health information, not medical advice, and doesn’t replace evaluation by your own physician. Talk to a doctor about anything specific to your own diagnosis or treatment.