Navigating Your Healthcare: A Guide to UCLA MyChart Sign-Up and Features

UCLA Health's MyChart offers a secure, online portal designed to streamline your healthcare experience. From scheduling appointments to communicating with your care team and managing prescriptions, MyChart puts you in control of your health information. This article provides a comprehensive guide to signing up for MyChart and utilizing its various features to enhance your healthcare journey.

The Convenience of MyChart: An Overview

MyChart is more than just an online portal; it's a comprehensive tool designed to make managing your healthcare easier and more efficient. Here's a glimpse into the benefits you can unlock by signing up for MyChart:

Effortless Appointment Scheduling: Scheduling medical appointments has never been easier.
Direct Communication with Your Care Team: Do you need to ask your care team a quick question? Log in to your account, navigate to the Message Center, and send a message to your healthcare team.
Prescription Management Made Simple: Log in to your account, navigate to the "Medications" section, and submit your refill request with a few simple clicks.
Streamlined Check-In Process: Completing your appointment check-in process online before your visit means you can skip most (or all) of the paperwork when you arrive in the waiting room.
Timely Reminders and Notifications: Log in to your account and navigate to the “Communication Preferences” section to opt in to receive appointment reminders and other notifications by text message, ensuring you never miss an important appointment.

Getting Started: Signing Up for MyChart

To enhance the security of your myUCLAhealth account, two-factor authentication is required when signing up, logging in, or resetting your password.

Utilizing Key MyChart Features

Once you're signed up for MyChart, you can take advantage of a range of features designed to simplify your healthcare management.

Text Message Notifications

UCLA Health offers text messaging to provide patients with convenient, timely notifications. These include text message appointment reminders, prescription reminders, MyChart notifications, updates related to visits or care management, one-time passcodes, billing alerts, and other patient-related messages.

Appointment Arrival Feature

You can use your smartphone to tell us when you've arrived at your appointment. The MyChart app sends a message to your phone 15 minutes before your appointment time asking if you’ve arrived. Follow these steps to use Appointment Arrival in the MyChart app:

When prompted, or in your mobile app settings, turn on the following features:

Appointment Arrival
Notifications

From your MyChart account:

When you are logged into your myUCLAhealth account or the MyChart app, you will see your upcoming visit.

Understanding MyChart Messaging and Billing

Most messages patients send to providers through myUCLAhealth are processed quickly and never billed to insurance. But those that take time and medical expertise are considered a type of virtual care - and are billed as such.

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Keep this general rule of thumb in mind: If it takes more than a few minutes for your healthcare provider to respond to your message, your insurance may be billed.

Proxy Access: Sharing Access to Health Information

MyChart also offers the option of granting proxy access to another individual, allowing them to view and manage your health information on your behalf.

What is a proxy?

A proxy is a person who has been granted access to view another patient’s health information.

Requesting Proxy Access

To a Child’s/Loved One’s Medical Record:

We recommend that you contact your doctor’s office for assistance.

Under normal circumstances, proxy access must be done in person. However, due to COVID-19, we are making exceptions. Temporarily, your doctor’s office can now provide proxy access over the phone, as long as certain criteria is met.

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No consent forms are required for children 0-17 years old.

However, if your child is between the ages of 12-17 (which is considered an adolescent in the state of California), verbal consent from the teen must be obtained prior to granting proxy access.

Note: Proxies of adolescents ages 12-17 will have limited access to the teen’s medical record (i.e., Health Issues, Allergies, Immunizations, and Test Results) and will not have access to past and future appointments (which enables video visits), hospital admissions, letters, referrals, clinical notes and medications/refill requests. If you are interested in a video visit for your teen, we encourage you to allow the teen to have his/her own myUCLAhealth account so that a video visit is possible. Your clinic can assist with scheduling an appointment and temporarily providing instant activation over the phone and proxy access due to COVID-19.

For information about the California Confidentiality Law, please visit the National Center for Youth Law or the California Adolescent Health Collaborative.

To an Adult Patient’s Medical Record:

If you’re wanting proxy access to an Adult patient’s account, the patient must complete a consent form, which the doctor’s office is prepared to discuss further with the patient.

Using the Proxy Invite Feature:

Patients can now invite someone to have full access to their medical record. Both parties must be active myUCLAhealth patients. Follow these steps to invite someone:

Click on Your Menu.
Scroll to Sharing.
Click Share My Record.
Fill out the required information and click Send.

The person you invited will receive a message. Once the invite is accepted, the person must provide the patient’s date-of-birth before access is granted.

Proxy Access and Diminished Capacity:

If you’re wanting proxy access for a child/loved one with diminished capacity (including an adolescent between the ages of 12-17), there is a consent form that must be completed and signed by the doctor to confirm that diminished capacity does exist.

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