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Personal Community Release Notes







1. New Features, Enhancements, and Corrections in Personal Community 2024.4

1.1. Features and Enhancements

1.1.1. Messaging REST API

The Messaging REST API allows organizations to send messages and attachments to Personal Community patients. For example, an organization may want to deliver education or letters to a patient digitally using the Personal Community inbox. The API supports messages of types: general, medical, and reply. Please refer to the Personal Community External Messaging Setup Guide for additional information on this API.

1.1.2. Message and Attachment Status Updates

Personal Community provides a public Messaging REST API that can be used by external systems (such as TrakCare or other EMRs) that allows for the sending of messages and attachments to a patient's Personal Community inbox.

This feature allows an external system to register for updates on the status of messages and attachments they have sent to patients using the Messaging REST API. This provides the organization that sent the message an accurate account of whether or not a patient is opening the information sent to their Personal Community inbox. Use of this feature requires that an external system has an API that is able to receive and process the message status updates. Sites will need to create the integration component within Personal Community to call these APIs.

Please review the Personal Community Messaging: Provider Initiated Messages from External Systems Setup Guide and the Personal Community Messaging Product Area Guide for additional information about how to configure Personal Community for message status updates.

1.1.3. Notification REST API

The Notification REST API allows organizations to send notifications to Personal Community patients to inform them of a new information or actions available in the application. For example, a patient may have new lab results visible, or the organization may have made Flu vaccine appointment available in Personal Community. These direct communications go directly to the patient and/or their proxy. Please refer to the Personal Community Notification Setup Guide for additional information on this API. 

2. New Features, Enhancements, and Corrections in Personal Community 2024.3

2.1. Features and Enhancements

2.1.1. Support for Custom Applications

Review Required

Teams are required to review their proposed applications with InterSystems   prior   to agreeing with the customer to provide this functionality.  Review is required to ensure that the application does not change the intended use of the product overall and affect our current compliance regulations.

Personal Community provides a series of patient facing workflows, designed to meet the needs of the global customer base. Regional needs for additional displays and workflows may be identified to best suit the region. In the event that a regional need is identified, and it is not in the global product roadmap, regions may create custom applications that can be embedded into Personal Community.

These custom applications can be added to the application as:

  • New main menu option (displayed on the unauthenticated page, authenticated page, or both)
  • New secondary menu option within an existing main menu.

These custom applications need to adhere to the intended use and best practices outlined below. 

This feature is intended to be used by regions to develop region-specific displays and content for Personal Community. It is not intended to change the fundamental feature set of the application.

Considerations

Regions building custom applications are the owners of the application and its functionality.  This includes:

  • Maintenance of the application.  This includes all bugs and enhancement requests for the application.
  • Support for the application.  Global product is not responsible for supporting any issues that arise within the content of the regional application.
  • Upgrading the application.  This will need to be coordinated with all Personal Community upgrades moving forward.
  • Deprecating the application when global functionality is released.

Limitations

The custom application feature has the following limitations:

  • Applications may not alter the intended use statement for Personal Community.
  • Applications introducing new workflows must be verified by risk and clinical safety prior to customer agreement.
  • Applications are currently limited to Angular micro front-end applications.
  • No role based access; all custom applications will be accessible by both patient and proxy.
  • Location restrictions; applications may only be added to the main menu and sections that have an existing secondary menu option.
  • Dynamic routing; while dynamic routes are supported, there is a limitation currently in how these routes behave with the standard refresh functionality.  If a user refreshes on a custom application that uses dynamic routes, they will be returned to the main page of the custom application.

2.1.2. Vital Signs Tab

Patients often have a standard set of observations completed at medical visits. Additional observations may also be captured depending on the type of visit. These observations are considered a part of their record. The   Vital Signs   section under   Records   provides patients the ability to view their aggregated observation data. From here, patients can view their most recent measurement captured for each observation item. Additionally, the patient may further drill in to view a graph of each observation item over time, and historical data.

Personal Community will default to filter out observations that are associated with   inpatient, emergency or pre-admission encounters .  Organizations may override this logic to include these observations if desired.

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

2.1.3. Granular Control of Update Profile

Personal Community has allowed for patients to make updates to demographics and preferences by enabling Patient Profile Updates in Feature Control. 

The Update Profile page allows a patient to review and update the following information:

  • Address
  • Email address
  • Mobile phone number
  • Communication preference
  • Language preference (if multiple languages are configured)

Some sites may not wish to expose all of these details to patients. This feature adds granular control of the Update Profile page, allowing sites the flexibility to only display and allow updates on a subset of the demographics and preferences information.

2.1.4. Add API Endpoint to return full set of web applications for Personal Community

The Web Application Information API provides an endpoint that can be used by an external system to retrieve the list of information about the available web applications for Personal Community. For example, this calling this endpoint retrieves the URLs for the SOAP web application and workbench public URL. For further information about working with this API, refer to the swagger documentation. 

3. New Features, Enhancements, and Corrections in Personal Community 2024.2

3.1. Features and Enhancements

3.1.1.  Personal Community Form Builder Enhancements

The Personal Community Form Builder allows organizations to build and manage digital forms within Personal Community. These digital forms can be sent to patients as part of the patient task functionality, allowing patients to receive and complete the digital forms within Personal Community.

This enhancement adds additional management capabilities to the Personal Community form builder.  With this release, organizations may now save draft versions of their forms.  Organizations may then edit and publish these saved drafts, or create new drafts for existing published forms.

This functionality is targeted towards our HealthShare customer base, or any external systems that will leverage the patient task functionality for digital forms.  TrakCare customers will predominately use the previously released questionnaire integration.

3.1.2.  Patient Document Upload Task Item

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) to create tasks and task items for individual patients.  This feature adds a new task item type (UploadDocument) to the existing patient task feature.  When using this task item, sites may request one or multiple files or images to be uploaded as part of a given task.  

Each uploaded document may be routed to a different location to support an organizations workflows.  Supported routes include:

  • Unified Care Record - Documents will be stored in a Personal Community Edge Gateway and made available as part of the patients aggregated record in Unified Care Record.
  • Custom Route -   Organizations have the ability to define a series of routes for the uploaded documents.    

Use of this feature in a production system requires the use of the Personal Community virus scanner.

3.1.3. Personal Community Virus Scanner Framework

Personal Community provides patients with the ability to upload physical documents from their personal devices.  In order to enable these features, it is required that the Personal Community virus scanner is properly configured and enabled.  Configuration of the Personal Community virus scanner depends on the anti-virus software installed on site.  Sites may use the provided   ClamAV® virus scanner implementation class, or extend the virus scanner framework to integrate with other anti-virus software.

The virus scanner is designed to be run on a distinct instance where appropriate antivirus software is installed and where the operating system and network have been configured to isolate the machine appropriately. The service is called by remote clients wishing to scan files.  

This feature is required in a production system when patient document uploads are enabled.

3.1.4. Granular Review Preferences Control

At the end of an account activation, the Review Preferences page is presented to the patient.  This page allows a patient to review and update the following information:

  • Email address
  • Mobile phone number
  • Communication preference
  • Language preference (if multiple languages are configured)

Some sites may not wish to expose all of these settings to patients. For example, they may not want to allow patients to update an email or mobile phone number if another system is acting as the source of truth for demographics data.

This feature adds granular control of the Review Preferences page, allowing sites the flexibility to only display the page if a patient is allowed to update any of the above details.

3.1.5. Customizable Logo Sizes

Personal Community allows sites to customize and brand the application. As part of this, sites are encourage to upload their company logo to be used as the icon in the browser and mobile title bars.  This enhancements gives the sites control of the size of the icon, allowing the title bar to grow dynamically to accommodate larger icons.

3.1.6.  Enable Forgot Username SMS Flow

During enrollment, it is required that patients have an email.  This email address is currently used by default when a patient enters the Forgot Username workflow. 

This enhancement allows sites to use SMS instead of email during the Forgot Username workflow.  This option is ONLY available if the site is requiring mobile phone numbers for all patients during enrollment.

To enable this feature, run the following command from your Personal Community namespace: 

zw ##class(HSPortal.Config.Values).%UpdateValue("ForgotUsernameFlow", "SMS") 

3.1.7. Support for Buddhist Era

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 display dates using the Buddhist Era format instead of the Common Era format.  This setting is configured at an individual locale level.

4. New Features, Enhancements, and Corrections in Personal Community 2024.1

4.1. Features and Enhancements

4.1.1.  Personal Community Form Builder

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.

The Personal Community Form Builder allows organizations to build and manage digital forms within Personal Community. These digital forms can be sent to patients as part of the patient task functionality, allowing patients to receive and complete the digital forms within Personal Community.

Please refer to the Personal Community Form Builder User Guide for more information on using this feature.

4.1.2.  Personal Community Forms Task Item

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) to create tasks and task items for individual patients.  This feature adds a new task item type (template) to the existing Patient Task API.  The template task item allows an organization to send digital forms built with the Personal Community Form builder to patients to complete as part of a task. 

Organizations have the ability to define a series of submission routes for the completed forms.    As of this release, Personal Community supports two submission routes:

  • Workbench Task - in this route, the submitted form will included in a workbench form task item.  Workbench Task Agents can then review and complete the task generated within the Workbench.
  • Custom - in this route, the organization defines a transform and submission operation to route the submitted form to an external system.

4.1.3. Support Signatures in Consent Management

Personal Community allows patients to manage their organizational consent documents via the Consent Management section of the application. Previous versions of Personal Community allowed for the following data types in consent: 

  • Text 
  • Date
  • Checkbox
  • Radio 
  • Select

This feature enhances consent data type support to include Signature data type. This allows a site to capture a patients signature electronically when a consent document is updated by a patient. A signature will be required to be entered by the patient at each instance of consent preference update. 

4.1.4. Enrollment Status API

Account status change notifications have allowed for notifications to be sent from Personal Community to sites in the case of account or MPI status changes. 

This feature provides sites an API that can be called to get the account status of a given patient. The API takes in a patient's identifiers and returns an account status. 

Please refer to the Onboarding and Account Management Setup Guide for more information on using this feature. 

5. New Features, Enhancements, and Corrections in Personal Community 2023.8

5.1. Features and Enhancements

5.1.1.  Patient Task Status Updates

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. 

This feature allows an external system to register for updates on the status of tasks they have sent to patients. This provides the organization that created the task an accurate account of whether or not a patient is interacting with materials sent to them. Use of this feature requires that an external system has an API that is able to recieve and process these status updates.  Sites will need to create the integration component within Personal Community to call these APIs.

Please review the Patient Entered Data Product Area Guide and Patient Entered Data Setup Guide for more information about how to configure Personal Community to send task status updates.

5.2. Corrections

  • HSPC-16012 - In previous versions of Personal Community, if a patient was viewing the application in Arabic and attempted to use a time picker (in either Consent or Questionnaires), an error would occur. This has been addressed so that a time may be selected and the form can be updated.  In this release, western Arabic numerals will be presented in the time picker.
  • HSPC-15627 - In previous versions of Personal Community, the search bar within the Records tables did not accurate filter when numbers and month names were used.  This has been correctly to provide accurate search results.

6. New Features and Enhancements in Personal Community 2023.7

6.1.  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.

6.2.  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.

7. New Features and Enhancements in Personal Community 2023.6

7.1.  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.

7.2. 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

8. New Features and Enhancements in Personal Community 2023.5

8.1. 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.

8.2. 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.

8.3.  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.

9. New Features and Enhancements in Personal Community 2023.4

9.1. 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.

9.2.  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.

10. New Features and Enhancements in Personal Community 2023.3

10.1. 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:

10.2.  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:

10.3.  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.

11. New Features and Enhancements in Personal Community 2023.2

11.1. 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.


11.2. 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.

11.2.1. 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

11.4. 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.

11.5. 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: