How to share MyChart access with a family caregiver

Proxy access is permission for one MyChart user to view and act inside another person's record from their own account. You keep your own login. The patient keeps theirs. When you sign in, a switcher at the top of the screen lets you move between your record and theirs.

The word "proxy" is Epic's term for the person doing the viewing. Some health systems use friendlier names on their own pages: "Friends and Family Access," "Caregiver Access," "Family Access," or just "sharing my record." They are describing the same underlying permission.

Two things make it different from handing over a password. First, everything you do is logged under your name, so the care team knows a message came from the daughter and not the patient. Some clinics reply differently when they know. Second, access has levels and an end date. The patient can grant a narrow view rather than the whole record, and can turn it off in about ten seconds without changing a single password.

What proxy access is not: it is not a legal document. It does not make you a healthcare power of attorney, it does not let you make decisions if the patient cannot speak, and it does not survive a hospital deciding to revoke it. Those are separate instruments, and if the situation is heading that way, our guide on getting power of attorney for an elderly parent covers the document that actually carries weight.

It is also not a records request. Proxy access shows you what the portal shows, live. If you need a copy of the record to hand to another doctor, an attorney, or a disability reviewer, that is a different process, and the full record download is the one you want.

Health systems treat proxy access differently depending on who the patient is. Knowing which bucket you are in tells you which form to fill out and what to expect.

Adult to adult. One competent adult grants another adult access to their record. This is the spouse, the adult child, the sibling, the close friend. The patient is in charge here. They request it, they choose the level, and they can revoke it. Most systems let the patient do the whole thing from inside MyChart with no paperwork. Some still require a signed form, especially for full access.

Parent or guardian to minor child. A parent gets access to a young child's record, usually by filling out a form at the pediatric practice or during registration. This is the most automatic of the three. Access typically comes with the ability to schedule visits, see immunizations, message the pediatrician, and view results.

Adolescent, which is where families get blindsided. At most health systems, a parent's full access to a child's record narrows sharply somewhere between the twelfth and thirteenth birthday, and ends entirely at eighteen unless the young adult re-grants it. This is not the hospital being difficult. State laws let minors consent to certain care on their own, most commonly reproductive health, mental health, and substance use treatment, and the portal cannot reliably separate that content from everything else. So systems restrict the whole view rather than risk exposing the protected part.

The practical consequence is worth planning for. If your kid is turning twelve, expect the results and notes to disappear from your view around that birthday. If your kid is turning eighteen, ask them to grant you proxy access on their own account before they leave for college, because the alternative is calling the medical records department from a dorm room during a fever.

A fourth case exists and is handled differently everywhere: access to the record of an adult who cannot consent, because of dementia, a stroke, or a serious brain injury. That is not a self-service path. It requires documentation, usually a healthcare power of attorney or guardianship order, submitted to the health information management department. Start that conversation early, before it is urgent.

The fastest route is for the patient to grant access from their own account. It takes a few taps and usually takes effect immediately.

On the MyChart website or in the app, the patient signs in and opens the menu. Look for "Sharing Hub." On systems that have not adopted that name yet, look for "Share My Record," "Friends and Family Access," or "Link accounts" in the account settings area. The Sharing Hub is the newer, consolidated place where Epic put all the sharing features, including the option to send your record to another provider.

Inside the Sharing Hub, choose the option about giving someone access to your record. Some versions call it "Friends and Family Access" and list anyone who already has access, with an "Invite someone" button below.

The patient enters the name and email address of the person they want to add, picks an access level, and sends the invitation. The person receiving it gets an email with a link. They either sign into an existing MyChart account at that health system or create one, enter a short code or the patient's date of birth to confirm, and the access appears.

Access levels vary by health system. Common tiers look something like: view only, which shows results and visit summaries; a middle tier that adds appointment scheduling; and full access, which adds messaging the care team and viewing billing. Some systems offer only one level. Pick the narrowest level that does the job, and widen it later if you need to.

If the patient cannot find any of these options, that is a real answer, not a failure to look. A minority of health systems disable self-service proxy invitations and route everything through a form. That is step four.

Every health system that offers proxy access publishes a form for it, usually as a PDF on the same page as the rest of their MyChart help content. Search the hospital name plus "MyChart proxy form" and it is almost always the first result. If not, call the medical records or health information management department and ask for "the MyChart proxy access authorization form."

The form asks for the patient's full name, date of birth, and medical record number if you have it; the proxy's full name, date of birth, and email address; the level of access being granted; and the patient's signature. Some systems require the signature to be witnessed or notarized for full access. Most do not.

Both people usually need to prove who they are. Expect to show photo ID, either in person at a registration desk or by uploading a photo with the form. This is the step that slows things down, and it is also the step that makes proxy access more trustworthy than a shared password.

Turnaround is typically a few business days once the completed form is received. If it has been more than a week, call and ask for the status. Forms get stuck in scanning queues, and a polite follow-up call usually clears it.

One tip that saves a return trip: fill the form out while you are already at an appointment. Registration desks can almost always process it on the spot, both people are present, and both IDs are in the room. Families who try to do it later, by email, are the ones still waiting three weeks on.

With full access at most health systems, a proxy sees roughly what the patient sees: test results as they are released, visit summaries and after-visit instructions, the medication list, allergies, immunizations, upcoming and past appointments, and clinical notes that the practice has released to the portal. They can usually message the care team, request refills, schedule visits, and see the account balance.

What is commonly withheld is narrower than families expect but consistent. Adolescent records within the confidential window are the biggest category. Psychotherapy notes, which are the therapist's own process notes rather than the therapy record, are excluded from portal release under federal privacy rules and generally are not visible to anyone, including the patient. Some results are held briefly before release when a clinician has flagged them for a conversation first, though information blocking rules have made that far less common than it was.

Two absences catch people off guard. Actual imaging pictures usually are not there. The portal shows the radiologist's report, which is the part that matters clinically, but the images themselves normally require a separate request to the imaging department for a disc or an image-sharing link. And older records, from before the health system moved to its current system, are often missing from the portal entirely even though the hospital still holds them.

It is worth being clear about what the portal is. MyChart shows a curated view of the record, built for patients, not the complete legal medical record. If you need everything, ask for everything, and expect it to arrive as a file rather than a web page.

One more thing to know: many health systems now pull in outside records automatically, so you may see labs or notes from another hospital appear inside the portal. That is a courtesy view of shared data, not proxy access to that other hospital. You still cannot message their doctors or see their full record.

Yes, one MyChart login can hold proxy access for several people. This is the normal case, not an exception. A person in the middle of family caregiving might hold their own record, their mother's, their father's, and two children's, all from one account.

After the second person is added, a switcher appears, usually as a row of names or photos at the top of the home screen, or under a "Switch patient" control in the menu. Tapping a name changes the whole app to that person's record. Notifications from all of them come to the same inbox, which is a mixed blessing when four people have lab results pending.

Two habits keep this from getting confusing. Add a photo or an initial to each profile if your system allows it, because a list of names in a small font at 6 a.m. is easy to misread. And check which record you are in before you send a message, because a refill request filed under the wrong parent generates a phone call nobody enjoys.

There is no practical limit on the number of people you can hold, though individual health systems sometimes cap it. If you hit a wall, call and ask; the cap is usually a policy setting and not a technical one.

Revoking is deliberately easy, and both sides can do it. The patient opens the Sharing Hub, finds the person in the list of people with access, and removes them or changes their level. It takes effect immediately. The proxy can also remove their own access to somebody else's record from their account settings, which is the clean way to step back when a sibling takes over the coordinating.

The health system can end access on its own too. The most common trigger is a birthday: a child reaching the adolescent threshold, or an eighteenth birthday ending parental access. Some systems also expire access after a set period and ask for it to be renewed.

A small piece of housekeeping that matters more than it sounds. When someone dies, portal access usually closes, sometimes with little warning. If you are managing an estate or expect to need the record later, request a copy of the full record while access is still live. This is one of the most common regrets families report, and it is easy to avoid.

Finally, if the relationship changes, revoke deliberately rather than quietly. Removing access in the app is complete and immediate; changing a password is not, because a proxy has their own login and is unaffected by it.

This is the part that surprises everyone, and it is worth understanding before you spend a Saturday on it.

MyChart is not one company's website with one account. It is software that hundreds of separate health systems run, each with its own installation, its own patient database, its own policies, and its own login. The app you download is the same app; the record behind it is not.

So proxy access granted at the cancer center does nothing at the community hospital, and neither one covers the orthopedic group across town. A person with a serious diagnosis frequently has records at three or four organizations: the primary care practice, the hospital where the surgery happened, the specialty center, and the imaging or lab company. Each of those is a separate proxy request, a separate form, and a separate approval.

There is a partial fix built into the app. MyChart lets you link accounts from different health systems so you can see them from one login, and Epic's cross-organization features can pull some outside data into a single view. It helps. It is not the same as full access, the data that flows across is a subset, and it only covers organizations that both use the same system and have turned the sharing on.

The practical approach is to make a list. Write down every organization the person has records at, and work through them one at a time, starting with the one where the active treatment is happening. Two a week is a reasonable pace. Our guide to tracking down old medical records covers what to do about the providers who have no portal at all.

Proxy access solves one problem well: letting a caregiver see what the patient sees, at one hospital. It does not solve the problem most families actually have, which is that the record is spread across several hospitals and several people need it at once.

The gaps are consistent. Records from a provider with no portal, or from a hospital the patient left five years ago, never appear. Paper handouts, discharge instructions, and the pharmacy printout are not in any portal. And the portal shows you the document without telling you what changed since the last one, which is the thing a family in the middle of treatment actually needs to know.

This is where a shared family record earns its place next to the portal rather than instead of it. In KeptWell, a care circle holds one archive for one person. Everyone invited to the circle sees the same records on their own phone, with roles that separate the admin who manages uploads from members who read and ask questions. Nobody forwards a PDF to anybody.

A MyChart connection pulls the portal records in directly, and you can add a second and a third health system to the same circle, which is the piece proxy access cannot do. Anything that never made it into a portal, the scanned paper, the photo of a handout, the voicemail from the nurse line, gets uploaded alongside it. KeptWell reads all of it, dates it, and writes a plain-English summary, so a family member who has not been at the appointments can catch up in a few minutes rather than reading nine PDFs.

Keep the portal. You need it for messaging the care team, scheduling, and refills, and nothing replaces that. Use the shared record for the part the portal was never built for: everything, in one place, readable by everyone who is helping.