11.11.2026

Today’s release brings family portal access to Canvas! Parents, guardians, adult children, and caregivers can now help manage a loved one’s care right from the patient portal: booking visits, messaging the care team, checking lab results, and paying bills, all with their own login. See Family Portal Access to get started.

Family Portal Access #

portal ui config sdk api

For families #

• A parent, guardian, adult child, or caregiver gets their own portal login for a patient’s chart, so they can help without sharing the patient’s password.
• One login covers the whole family: a parent who is also a patient switches between their own record and each child’s without signing out.
• Family members are notified about new messages, lab results, statements, and appointment reminders in the areas they can see.
• Family members confirm the patient’s date of birth before opening a chart, and patients can see who has access to their record.

What a family member sees and can do follows the access your staff give them in each area. With None, that area’s pages don’t appear in their portal.

For your staff #

• Access starts from the contacts on the patient’s chart. In the patient’s Profile → Portal, pick a contact and control their access to Appointments, Messaging, Clinical, and Billing content, choosing None, View, or Full for each. The contact needs an email address or phone number, or a link to their own patient chart.
• Manage each person’s access in the same place: send their invite, see whether they’ve been invited, change their access levels, or remove access.
• Messages, bookings, and cancellations from a family member read as them acting for the patient in the inbox, the timeline, and the note footer, such as “Jordan Rivera, for Maya”.
• A patient’s Portal section lists the other charts their own login can open through family portal access, each linked for staff to open.
• If a family member says they don’t know the patient, their access pauses and the care team lead gets a task to review it.
• If a family member enters the wrong date of birth three times, the chart locks for them. Staff see the lock in the patient’s Portal section and can unlock it there.

Turning it on #

• New Constance config FAMILY_PORTAL_ACCESS turns on family portal access. Reach out to Canvas support to enable it for your instance.
• Before you turn it on, review the plugins you use in the patient portal. Canvas’s built-in pages follow each family member’s access, and your plugins need an update to do the same.
  • SimpleAPI routes your portal pages call, such as ones that authenticate with PatientSessionAuthMixin, may need an update. A route serves family members once it declares the access it needs with PORTAL_ACCESS, and until then it serves the patient only. Once it does, check who is signed in and what access they have before acting.
  • A plugin’s widgets, menu items, and applications appear for family members as they do for the patient. Update them to check who is signed in and what access that person has before deciding what to show and allow, so a family member only sees and does what their access covers.

For plugin developers #

• Build family-aware portal experiences: greet a parent with their child’s next appointment, hide a balance reminder from someone without billing access, or keep a page just for the patient. See Family Portal Access.
  • Read the portal access a family member has on a chart, area by area.
  • In SimpleAPI and WebSocket, see who is acting on the chart and declare the access each route needs.
  • In a portal menu application, read both the patient whose chart is open and the person signed in, so the application can open a different page for a family member than for the patient.

FHIR API #

• A family member acting through family portal access is named as their RelatedPerson.
  • Communication:
    • A message a family member sent names their RelatedPerson as its sender.
    • Search by sender=RelatedPerson/<id> to find the messages family members sent through that contact’s access.
    • Create a message from a family member by setting sender to their RelatedPerson and recipient to a practitioner.
  • Provenance: when a family member creates or changes a record on the patient’s chart, agent.who references the RelatedPerson their access was given from.