---
title: Patient Portal | Avara
description: A modern patient portal for forms, appointments, results, DICOM viewing, documents, payments, and secure messaging.
---

## Overview

The **patient portal** is your patients’ home base in the Avara Clinical Platform — an intuitive, easy-to-use space where they manage their relationship with your practice without phone tag, paper packets, or clunky legacy portals.

Healthcare software has **historically neglected the patient experience**. Portals are often afterthoughts: hard to navigate, visually dated, and limited to the bare minimum your EHR required. Avara takes the opposite approach. The patient portal is designed with a **modern, elevated feel** — clear layout, thoughtful flows, and the kind of polish patients expect from consumer apps.

Our goal is a **boutique, concierge-level experience for every patient**, whether your organization is a high-volume imaging center, a specialty clinic, or a solo provider. The same portal that works for complex intake and imaging follow-up should feel welcoming for a simple follow-up visit.

## What Patients Can Do

### Intake and Forms

Patients complete **[patient intake forms](/clinical-platform/patient-forms/index.md)** assigned to their appointments — consents, questionnaires, and conditional logic-driven intake — directly in the portal. Responses save as a **native electronic record** in Avara; staff review submissions in the form viewer without re-keying paper.

Forms assigned after [self-serve booking](/clinical-platform/self-serve-booking/index.md) or staff scheduling can be finished before the visit, reducing day-of clipboard work. Patients can also **view completed forms** they have already submitted when they need to reference what they attested to.

### Appointments

Patients see **appointment status and details** for visits with your organization — when they are scheduled, what service they booked, and the context they need to prepare. The portal keeps the schedule legible so patients are not guessing about time, location, or next steps.

### Results

When your workflow releases them, patients can **view results** from their care — outcomes, reports, and other result types your practice chooses to share through the portal. Release rules stay on your side; the portal is the secure delivery channel once content is patient-appropriate.

### DICOM Imaging

Patients have **full access to their DICOM studies** in the portal and can **view them** using Avara’s integrated viewer — the same high-performance imaging experience your staff uses, adapted for patient-facing access. The viewer is **optimized for mobile** as well as desktop, so patients can review scans on a phone or tablet without installing a separate app. Imaging-heavy practices no longer need a separate patient CD workflow or third-party viewer link for patients who want to see their own scans.

Studies appear when your organization shares them according to your clinical and release policies.

### Documents

Patients can **upload documents** your team requests — insurance cards, outside records, referral letters, prior reports — and **view documents** already on file, including uploaded files and **completed forms**. Everything lives in one place instead of scattered email attachments.

### Payments

Outstanding balances can be **paid in the portal** through your organization’s **[Stripe Connect](/clinical-platform/stripe-connect/index.md)** setup — credit, debit, HSA, and FSA where supported. Patients settle what they owe without calling billing or returning to the front desk for a separate payment link.

### Secure Messaging

Patients can **message your team** through the portal when they need a question answered or a update from your office. Messages route to staff with **Can Message Patients** permission — typically **care coordinators**, **concierge providers**, and front-office or clinical staff who own patient communication.

Conversations are **secure and two-way**: authorized staff reply from their dedicated patient messaging workspace in the platform. See [Messaging — Patient Messaging](/clinical-platform/messaging/#patient-messaging/index.md) and [Inviting Users — Can Message Patients](/clinical-platform/inviting-users/#can-message-patients/index.md) for how permissions and staff-side messaging work.

## What Stays Staff-Facing

Not everything in the chart belongs in the patient portal. **[Chart notes](/clinical-platform/chart-notes/index.md)** are **internal clinical documentation** — they are **never visible to patients** in the portal. **Documents** your team uploads and does **not mark as patient visible** are also **hidden from the patient** — only files and records you explicitly release appear in their portal view.

Patient-visible content is what your workflows intentionally release: forms, results, imaging, shared documents, and messages — not behind-the-scenes staff notes or internal-only uploads.

## A Portal Worth Using

When the portal is pleasant to use, patients actually use it — forms get done before arrival, balances get paid, messages get answered in channel, and imaging gets viewed without extra support calls. That is the operational payoff of treating patient software as a first-class product, not a checkbox.

Intake, scheduling, imaging, and billing on the Clinical Platform all **feed the same patient record** the portal reads from — so patients see a coherent story across visits, not disconnected modules.

For form design, booking rules, and payment setup, see [Patient Forms](/clinical-platform/patient-forms/index.md), [Self-Serve Booking](/clinical-platform/self-serve-booking/index.md), and [Stripe Connect](/clinical-platform/stripe-connect/index.md).