Skip to main content

HealthShare Personal Community Release Notes







1. New Features and Enhancements in Personal Community 2023.7

1.1.  Invitation to Enroll API

One of the challenges with patient facing applications is the general adoption of the application by patients. Successful organizations often roll out manual marketing campaigns or other digital campaigns (through social media, their CRM, etc) to inform patients of the application and benefits for the patient.

This feature provides sites with an API that can be embedded into existing workflows in their application to automatically invite the patient to enroll in Personal Community, if they are not already a member. This API allows a site to specify the name of the patient, either their email address or mobile phone number, and their preferred language.  Personal Community will use this information to send the patient either a text message or email message with the content in the preferred language.

Sites have the ability to define workflow specific content for each invitation.

For example:

  • a patient recently had lab work done and the labs became available; the site could send an invitation to that patient to enroll in Personal Community view their lab results.
  • a patient has moved off of the waiting list and can now book a specific appointment; the site could send an invitation to that patient to enroll in Personal Community so they can book their appointment at their earliest convenience


This API is meant to be used alongside other Personal Community APIs that interact with enrolled patients to drive adoption and sustained use of the application.

Please review the Onboarding and Account Management Product Area Guide and the Onboarding and Account Management Setup Guide for more information about how to use this API from an external system.

1.2.  Member Search Enhancements

In this release, the Search for Members page of the Personal Community Workbench  Members tab has been updated to allow sites to now search by a patient's email address or mobile phone number.

2. New Features and Enhancements in Personal Community 2023.6

2.1.  Patient Tasks

An integral part of an organization's patient engagement strategy is the ability to provide patients with the ability to receive and complete task items prior to appointments and visits, or after they have been discharged. Often times, these are done over the phone, or in person when the patient arrives to check in for their service, often using paper forms to capture assessments and consent.

Personal Community provides a public REST API that can be used by external systems (such as TrakCare, other EMRs or Customer Relationships Management systems) that allow for the generation of tasks and task items to be sent to individual patients.  Sites can configure these external triggers to automatically create and send tasks based on actions within the external system.  Once generated, patient's receive a notification about the tasks to complete.

For the 2023.6 release, two types of tasks are supported:

  • Document - this can contain physical documents or links to external content
  • Questionnaires (TrakCare ONLY) - this provides a full integration between Personal Community and TrakCare to allow TrakCare questionnaires to be completed within Personal Community.

Please review the Patient Entered Data Product Area Guide and Patient Entered Data Setup Guide for more information about how to use this API from an external system.

2.2. Update Profile

It is not uncommon for users of Personal Community to need to make adjustments to their profile over time to ensure that information is up to date and that their current preferences are met.  Patient's currently have a Profile Summary section within their Account Settings.  This area contains the following information about the patient:

  • Name
  • Date of Birth
  • Address
  • Email
  • Mobile Phone
  • Preferred Language (only displayed if multiple languages are enabled)
  • Communication Preferences (for example "You are receiving notifications by email")


Of this information, patients are able to update information that affects how they may be communicated with.  This includes:

  • Address (for physical letters)
  • Email
  • Mobile Phone
  • Preferred Language
  • Communication Preferences

If this feature is enabled, patients can use the Update Profile section in Personal Community to adjust those values.  On submission, the following occurs:

  • Patient information stored in Personal Community is updated and immediately viewable
  • These updates are pushed to the Unified Care Record to ensure the Personal Community demographics associated with our MRN and assigning authority are synchronized
  • Optionally: These demographics are pushed to external systems that are accepting PIX Notifications from the Unified Care Record
  • Optionally:  These demographics are pushed to TrakCare to update the patient's record

3. New Features and Enhancements in Personal Community 2023.5

3.1. Viewing Documents in Records

Patients often have a series of documents or reports that are considered part of their record. The Documents section under Records provides patients the ability to view their aggregated documents.  From here, patients can view any text documents on screen, or download any physical documents to their devices.

Organizations may use the Configuration Application to control whether or not to display the document section to their users.

3.2. Additional OAuth 2.0 Authorization Token Support

Personal Community allows sites to integrate with an external identity provider (IdP) to enroll and sign into Personal Community.  Prior to this change, Personal Community relied on ID Tokens to validate the user.

With this change, Personal Community will support the use of JSON web tokens (JWT) and opaque tokens.

Sites using JWT should also provide an OpenID Connect (OIDC) userInfo endpoint to Personal Community. The OIDC userInfo endpoint will provide Personal Community the unique identifier for the patient that will be used to identify the member within the Unified Care Record. Additionally, the userInfo should provide Personal Community with additional demographic information about the member.  This information can be used to populate the Personal Community demographics for the member.  If sites using JWT cannot provide a userInfo endpoint, the JWT  must  contain at a minimum the unique identifier for the patient so they can be properly matched.

Sites using opaque tokens are required to provide both a token introspection endpoint and an OIDC userInfo endpoint.  The token introspection endpoint will be used to validate the opaque token, and the OIDC userInfo will be used to provide the unique identifier and additional demographic data.

3.3.  Support Multiple External Credentials for one Personal Community Account

As organizations support more applications in their ecosphere, they may need to support multiple identity providers (IdP) for each patient.  Previous versions of Personal Community have a limitation where only one set of credentials can be linked to a Personal Community account, all subsequent attempts with other IdPs are rejected.

This feature would allow a patient that begins with either Personal Community credentials or external credentials to add additional external credentials to their account.  From a patient workflow, they will not notice any differences, they will be prompted to sign in, and upon authentication Personal Community will realize they are a known patient and add the credentials to their existing account.  At that point, the patient can use any of their active credentials to sign in.

4. New Features and Enhancements in Personal Community 2023.4

4.1. Patient Contributions to HealthShare Care Community Care Plans

An integral part of an organization's patient engagement strategy is the ability to provide patients with the ability to digitally capture and send information about themselves to their providers.

With the combination of  Personal Community  and  HealthShare Care Community  patients become an integral member of the care team.  This combination allows patients to be active participants in their Care Community care plans, including the ability to answer and complete plans sent to them by members of their care team.

If a patient has a care plan to complete, the  Home   page will now include a  To Do  box.  This box will list any outstanding care plans that have been sent to a patient.  From here, the patient can simply fill out the care plan as requested, and submit it back to their care team.

All completed care plans are viewable to the patient in the  Records ,  Care  Plans  section.

4.2.  Support for Right to Left Languages

An integral part of an organization's patient engagement strategy is the ability to provide patients with an easy to use and understand application, in the language that the patient speaks.  Personal Community provides multi-language support to organizations to better serve their population.  

This enhancement extends the existing language support to include the ability to translate and enable languages that display right to left.  In addition, this release ships with a baseline translation for Arabic.

5. New Features and Enhancements in Personal Community 2023.3

5.1. Telehealth Visits

This feature enhances Personal Community's Upcoming Appointments display.  If the meeting is a telehealth visit, on the day of the appointment the Upcoming Appointments box on the home page as well as the Upcoming Appointments section of Appointments will include a Start button.  This will launch the telehealth visit for this event.

In addition, if they patient downloads their upcoming appointment to their personal calendar, it will now contain the meeting link (if one was provided).

For more information, consult the following guides:

5.2.  Displaying HealthShare Care Community Care Plans

An integral part of an organization's patient engagement strategy is the ability to provide patients with access to their medical record anytime, anywhere, in a way that is understandable to them.

In Personal Community, patients can view a comprehensive overview of their medical records in the Records tab. This feature enables a new section to the  Records  page of the public application:  Care Plans .

On the  Care Plans  page, patients are able to view any active care plans they have within  HealthShare Care Community .

For more information, consult the following guides:

5.3.  Granular Control of Messaging Functionality

In previous versions of Personal Community, the messaging functionality was controlled by a single setting. This meant that if messaging was enabled, a site immediately had to provide support for both patient initiated messaging as well as provider initiated messaging.  In addition, sites would also have to support both the Ask a General Question and Ask a Medical Question workflows.

This enhancement separates the functionality so that sites have more granular control when it comes to enabling messaging.  With this enhancement, sites may now decide to enable the following:

  • Patient initiated messaging, with granular support for medical, general, and billing questions
  • Patient replies (either to provider initiated messages or to continue a conversation)
  • Provider initiated messaging

With these options, a site can now decide to enable just the Personal Community inbox, enabling automatic education and notification, without enabling and having to staff the patient initiated workflows.

6. New Features and Enhancements in Personal Community 2023.2

6.1. Overview

Personal Community version 2023.2 introduces a brand-new user interface for the public application.

6.2. Onboarding and Account Management

Users of Personal Community will need to view and manage their account and profile details. This can include the ability to manage account information (such as viewing their username or resetting their password, viewing and managing basic demographics and contact information, viewing and managing language and contact preferences), as well as understanding what proxy relationships they are a part of.

This release provides the following functionality for patients to manage their accounts:

  • View account settings
  • View active and inactive proxy relationships
  • Update password
  • Reset forgotten password
  • Retrieve forgotten username

This functionality allows patients to easily view and manage their account details within the application.

For more information, consult the following guides:

6.2.1. Two-Factor Authentication for Sign-In

Personal Community supports the use of  two-factor authentication  to add a second layer of security to patient accounts. Personal Community uses a time-based one-time password (OTP) mechanism; after entering their account password, the patient enters a verification code sent to their mobile phone or email. This verification code expires after 6 minutes and the patient can only use it a single time. Sites use the Feature Control page in the Workbench Configuration Application to enable or disable Two-Factor Authentication.


6.2.2. Using External Credentials with Personal Community over OAuth 2.0

This release introduces the ability for organizations to enable the use of credentials from external identity providers (such as NHS Login, MyGov or UAE Pass) for their patients. This allows organizations to leverage existing identity providers so that their patients can use a single set of credentials across a suite of applications.

Organizations deploying Personal Community now have three options for managing credentials for accounts:

  • Personal Community Credentials only 

  • External Credentials only

  • Personal Community Credentials and External Credentials

This release of Personal Community supports integration with identity providers using OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.0. Organizations may leverage this platform to build integrations to specific external credential providers.

6.2.2.1. Use of Proxy Relationships with External Credentials

Personal Community allows organizations to establish proxy relationships between members.  In this release, use of proxy relationships is supported in all three deployment models for managing credentials with the following conditions: 

  • When only allowing Personal Community credentials, relationships will continue to behave as in previous versions: relationships may be established between any user that is not flagged as inactive. Patients that do not have Personal Community accounts will have an account created for them as part of the proxy relationship creation workflow.

  • When only allowing external credentials, relationships will only be allowed to be created between two active members of Personal Community. Patients must use their external credentials to create an account prior to the proxy relationship being established.

  • When allowing both Personal Community credentials and external credentials, relationships may be established between any user that is not flagged as inactive.  Patients that do not have Personal Community accounts will have accounts created for them (with Personal Community credentials) as part of the proxy relationship creation workflow. Patients that wish to use their external credentials should enroll and create an account in Personal Community prior to the proxy relationship being established.


Organizations may opt to allow their patients the ability to view and/or manage their consent preferences. This includes services that patients can opt-in (or out) of. Examples of consent policies include:

  • opting to receive marketing content
  • sharing demographic information

This feature allows consent documents created in an external system to be exposed to patients in Personal Community. From here, patients can view, and optionally update their answers, which feed back into the external system.

 Organizations may enable the following options:

  • Patient view access
  • Patient edit access
  • Proxy edit access

6.3. Patient Data Access

An integral part of an organization's patient engagement strategy is the ability to provide patients with access to their medical record anytime, anywhere, in a way that is understandable to them.

In Personal Community, patients can view a comprehensive overview of their medical records in the Records tab. Personal Community allows patients to view their data within the public application. Patients can also access educational content pertaining to information in their medical records.

The  Records  page in the public application contains the following sections:

  • Summary  — This section contains an aggregated view of the following data types:  Allergies ,   Medications ,  Care Team ,  Conditions ,  Procedures ,  Vaccinations .

  • Results   — This section contains the following types of results:  Lab Results   and  Radiology Results .

On the  Summary  page, Personal Community allows patients to consult educational resources relevant to the specific records they are viewing. For each eligible record, an info button may appear that links to educational content.

This release of Personal Community enhances the visualization of medical data for patients. This includes:

  • New, modern user interface for displaying medical information
  • New summary layout to view the aggregated information for key medical items
  • New results section for the visualization of lab and imaging results
  • Meters to quickly, clearly indicate if a lab value is within the normal range
  • Ability to download any available result report
  • Ability to search for specific lab and imagine results (browser-view only)
  • Ability to connect to third-party content providers to provide in-context education for the summary page
  • Ability to view images of their results in the  Records  tab and the  Results  card on the home page. For this, it is a requirement that you have a third-party, patient-facing PACS viewer.
  • Ability to control the following information in the  Records tab:
    • Whether the Records menu item is enabled
    • Whether the Summary and Results tabs are enabled
    • What data to display under each tab
    • Whether or not to use the information buttons in the Summary tab

For more information, consult the following guides:


6.4. Appointment Management

In Personal Community, members can manage their appointments both on the home page and on the Appointments page. On the home page, members can view details about their upcoming appointment (if they have one). This includes the date, time, address, and the option to download a calendar event to add the appointment to another calendar application. On the Appointments page, they can view both upcoming and past (or cancelled) appointments, which are in separate tabular views. Members additionally have the option to cancel any upcoming appointments.

This release of Personal Community adds the following functionality for appointment management:

  • Ability to pull appointment information from the Unified Care Record
  • Display of next scheduled appointment on home page
  • Comprehensive view of all upcoming appointments
  • Ability to download or add appointment information to personal calendars
  • Comprehensive view of all past and cancelled appointments

For more information, consult the following guides:

6.4.1. Pre-payment of services

In certain regions, patients are allowed to pre-pay or pre-authorize payment prior to receiving the actual service.  Personal Community itself is not intended to be used as a payment gateway. If payment is enabled, patients are redirected to the payment gateway link provided for each upcoming appointment to pay there. The feature allows sites to enable this functionality.

This release of Personal Community adds the ability for sites to enable pre-payment or pre-authorization of funds prior to service. If enabled, patients will see a Pay button next to their upcoming appointments if pre-payment is available. 

See the documentation for more information.

6.5. Billing

An important part of patient engagement is allowing patient to see and pay any outstanding bills that exist for them.  For this, Personal Community has a robust Billing System infrastructure that allows sites to easily integrate Personal Community with an external payment gateway to make the following functionality available to their patients:

  • View a list of finalized patient bills
  • Download their bills
  • Redirect patients to their payment gateway to pay any outstanding bills

This release of Personal Community adds a new  Bills  section to the application. Patients may use this section to view, download, and pay their bills (from the payment gateway). 

For more information, consult the following guides:

6.6. Messaging

An integral part of an organization's patient engagement strategy is the ability to provide patients with the ability to communicate with their providers.  This communication could include questions about what they see within Personal Community, question about their medical health, or non-medical questions for a facility.

This feature provides patients an accessible, efficient, and reliable workflow for asking questions and/or expressing concerns to their providers.

This release of Personal Community supports the following messaging activities:

  • Messages sent by patients to providers
  • Asking general, medical, or billing questions
  • Ability to reply to messages from providers
  • Messages sent by providers to members
  • Sending provider-initiated messages to patients
  • Replying to messages from patients

In addition, this release provides a new user interface for patients to manage their messages and message their provider. This includes:

  • Streamlined message composition flow
  • Searching for providers and groups
  • Tagging providers as favorites
  • Inbox, Sent box, and Archived boxes

Finally, external systems can be configured to send messages directly into a patient's inbox. These messages can include attachments.

For more information, see the Messaging Documentation .

6.7. News

This enhancement introduces a News section to Personal Community.  Organizations may opt to enable this section and populate it with the news feeds for their organization.

Personal Community supports news feeds using RSS (Rich Site Summary, and also known as Really Simple Syndication). RSS is a standardized format for delivering frequently changing web content. RSS feeds are streams of RSS data that sites can display. RSS feeds are available from major national and international news organizations as well as from various other news organizations (such as for local or medical news). Personal Community displays RSS feed content on both its home page and on the  News   page.

The RSS feed on the unauthenticated home page (on a browser) displays the three most recent news items; this number is fixed. On the  News page, the 50 most recent news items are displayed, across all feeds.

For more information, consult the following guides:

6.8. Branding the Application

Personal Community is meant to be part of an organization's larger patient engagement strategy.  As such, it is imperative that an organization can alter the application so that it fits the aesthetic of other applications being used by the organization.

This release introduces a new user interface for system administrators and implementers to configure aspects of Personal Community.  This user interface is an extension of the existing Workbench application, and can be accessed by users with the Configuration Manager role.

The branding user interface allows an organization to quickly update the appearance of the public application. From this page, users can configure the following:

  • Organization Title
  • Application Title
  • Application Icon
  • Application color palette

Changes made in the branding user interface are immediately reflected in the public application.  This functionality allows organizations to quickly brand the application to match other applications on-site.

For more information, see the Installation Documentation .