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The patient portal is a secure web area where patients sign in to see appointments, documents and telehealth links, and message the hospital. This tab names it, brands it, decides which parts of it exist, and puts it online.

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What this tab controls

At the top sits a hero card: the master Client Portal switch, the live address on client.clinikehr.com with copy and open buttons, and the publish button. Below it, seven tabs. The tab-by-tab detail is covered in Enable the portal and Portal features rather than repeated here.
The switch in the hero card is labelled Client Portal while the sidebar calls the tab Patient Portal. Same portal, same people — help pages bold what is actually on your screen.

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Set it up

1

Name the portal

On Branding, enter a Portal Name — what patients see at the top of the page, usually the hospital’s name.
2

Claim your address

Still on Branding, enter a URL Slug. It is checked as you type for shape, for reserved and unsuitable words, and against every other workspace. Your address becomes client.clinikehr.com/ plus that slug.
3

Turn the master switch on

In the hero card, switch Client Portal on. Its caption changes from “Currently disabled” to “Active & accessible”.
4

Work through the seven tabs

Decide what the portal offers before anyone can reach it. Start with Privacy — it governs who may register — then Appointments and Documents.
5

Select Save Changes

The button saves and publishes in one action. It then turns green and reads Live with a pulsing dot.
Once the portal is live, that green Live button is not a save button. Selecting it unpublishes the portal — the tooltip reads “Unpublish Client Portal” and you get “Portal unpublished successfully”. Every patient is then facing a portal that no longer exists. To change a setting on a live portal, edit it and use the Save Changes button at the foot of the page; leave the green Live button alone unless you genuinely intend to take the portal down.

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What changes once you save

Publishing puts your address online. Nobody is signed in yet, because two conditions must both hold before any one patient can get in:
  1. The hospital-wide switch on this tab, and
  2. that individual patient’s own portal access, set on their record.
A patient who cannot sign in almost always has the second one switched off, not the first. That is deliberate — publishing the portal must not hand an account to every person on the hospital’s list. Enabling the portal also enables individual self-registration, because those permissions default to on. If you want to invite people one at a time instead, open Privacy and turn self-registration off before you publish. Elsewhere in the product, a patient record gains portal status, and documents you send become readable in the portal rather than only through an emailed link. Turning a feature tab off later removes it from the portal at once; it does not delete anything a patient already saw. Only the owner can change any of this. Managers and accountants who can reach settings see the whole tab read-only.

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Check it worked

Copy the address from the hero card and open it in a private browser window. You should reach a branded sign-in page carrying your Portal Name, not a not-found error. Then enable portal access for one real patient and ask them to confirm they can sign in and see their next appointment.

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Common issues

Save is blocked until both Portal Name and URL Slug are filled in. Until the slug exists the hero card says “Set a URL slug in Branding to publish your portal”. It is also blocked while the slug check is failing.
The portal starts on Starter: “The Client Portal is a premium feature available on our Starter, Essential and Team plans.” See Change your plan.
Those two tabs need Essential or above. The rest of the portal works without them.
Only the owner can edit portal settings. Everyone else with settings access sees it read-only.
Slugs must be lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens, must not be a reserved word, and must be unused across every workspace — not only yours. The indicator under the field names the rule that failed.
Check the second condition: open their record and confirm portal access is on for them. A published portal alone does not create accounts.