Healthcare Patient Portal Remediation
Patients were abandoning critical healthcare tasks because the portal was unusable with assistive tech. We audited, remediated, and retrained their team on accessibility best practices.
- Client
- Regional Health System
- Industry
- Healthcare
- Timeline
- 10 weeks
- Services
- Accessibility Audit · Portal Remediation · HIPAA Compliance Review · Team Training
- Tags
- Results
- +89% Completion100% Compliance10wk Timeline
The Challenge
The health system's patient portal handled appointment scheduling, test results, prescription refills, and provider messaging for 200,000+ patients. But patients using screen readers or keyboard navigation could not complete basic tasks. Appointment scheduling required mouse-only drag interactions. Test results were displayed in inaccessible data tables. The messaging system had no keyboard support.
Patient complaints were increasing, and the health system faced potential ADA compliance action.
Our Approach
Phase 1: Clinical Workflow Audit (Weeks 1-3)
We audited the portal through the lens of critical patient workflows, not just individual components. Every path a patient might take — from logging in to completing a task — was mapped and tested with NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver, and keyboard-only navigation.
Phase 2: Priority Remediation (Weeks 4-8)
We remediated workflows in order of clinical importance:
- Appointment scheduling rebuilt with accessible date picker and time slot selection
- Test results restructured from visual layout tables to properly marked-up data tables with column headers and row associations
- Prescription refills rebuilt with accessible form patterns and confirmation dialogs
- Provider messaging rebuilt with keyboard-navigable thread interface and screen reader announcements for new messages
Phase 3: Training & Monitoring (Weeks 9-10)
We trained the health system's development and QA teams on accessible development practices, established automated accessibility testing in their CI pipeline, and created a monitoring dashboard for ongoing compliance tracking.
Results
- 89% improvement in task completion rates for assistive technology users
- 100% WCAG 2.1 AA compliance across all patient-facing workflows
- Automated testing pipeline catches regressions before deployment
- Zero ADA complaints in the six months following remediation
Key Takeaway
Healthcare accessibility requires thinking in terms of clinical workflows, not just individual components. A button can pass every automated test and still be inaccessible if it exists within a broken flow. Start with the patient journey and work backward to the component level.