Managing Patient Portal for Couples or Families

Are you seeing minors with high-conflict parents, or are you seeing couples in therapy? 

Read on to find our suggestions on how to handle these situations in TherapyAppointment!

In many circumstances, couples in treatment or the parents of a child being treated can ‘ share’ a single login for the patient portal.

If both members of the couple/parental unit need to e-sign forms, duplicates of forms can be provided in that portal for them to sign and/or you can create forms that allow for more than one signature field. 

However, in other instances, when you have high-conflict couples or parents, separate portals can be used for collecting documentation as follows:

Couples: Create each member of the couple as a patient and invite them to the patient portal to sign documents online. Then proceed to review this help article about how to write the session note: Couple or Family Charts
Parents: Typically you may need both parents to sign forms, and then designate only one member of the parental unit to manage the scheduling and receive the invoicing.
  1. Create a patient and enter parent #1's email, which will send the invitation to parent # 1's email.
  2. Create an identical patient and enter parent #2’s email, which will send the invitation to parent # 2's email.
  3. Once both parents have completed the forms, you can then ‘merge’ the two identical patients together, whichever ‘parent’ you choose to keep will then have control over scheduling/payment.

    Here’s how: Client Merging
⚠️ Note: In order for the other parent to get appointment reminders about the session, be sure and set up reminders in the combined patient profile to go out to both parents.