Tracing Care is a hands-on practice platform that looks and works like a real patient portal, filled with made-up but realistic information. Older adults and the people who help them can practice finding results, messaging the care team, requesting refills, and managing appointments, step by step. A track for students who need EHR experience is in progress.
No login needed. Every name and record is made up, so you can't break anything.
Results, refills, bills, and messages now live in portals and electronic health records. Yet patients, families, and future health workers rarely get a safe place to learn them, and real records are too sensitive to practice on.
Portals ask people to find results, request refills, and pay bills on their own. Many older adults were never shown how, and some avoid portals altogether.
Scams targeting older adults are rising fast. Real health records are private and valuable, so families and community programs are careful about who sees them. That makes it hard to teach on a real portal.
Health jobs ask for EHR experience, but training on major systems like Epic usually requires a hospital sponsor. Many students finish school without ever practicing on one.
About half of people who use a portal have also used one for someone else, often an aging parent or spouse. They learn the system on the fly, usually in the middle of a real health problem.
Tracing Care recreates the tools people meet in real health care, then adds the support a real system never gives you: hints, plain language, and room to make mistakes.
One instruction at a time, told as a short story about Robin: "Robin has a visit coming up. Can you find the date and time?" Learners find answers and do real portal tasks, with supportive feedback and hints when they need them.
Robin Merriweather's full practice portal with no instructions, organized the way many clinic portals are, with familiar names like Visits, Test Results, Messages, and Billing Summary. Learners click around freely, just like in a real portal.
A look at the other side of the screen: what clinical, billing, and front-office staff work with. Open to explore now, and the base for the career track.
After the patient track, guided training for people building careers in health care, using the same staff screens.
Familiar layouts, plain language, and clear labels, so the skills carry over to the portal at a learner's own doctor's office.
Learners can practice on a library computer, a tablet at home, or their own phone, with bigger text whenever they need it.
Robin has a visit coming up. Can you find the date and time?
Start with Guided Practice for step-by-step help. Ready to try on your own? Use Explore Mode.
Built for older adults and the people who help them. Seven short lessons about Robin, like finding a visit, reading a test result, or asking for a refill, with hints, bigger text, and a simple summary at the end. No name or sign-up needed.
Or try Explore Mode on your ownA practice space with made-up information, not a medical record. Learners never enter their own details.
These staff screens will become a guided career track for clinical, billing, and admin learners. You can look around now.
Command Center, patient census, referrals, and the provider calendar.
Look aroundClaims queue, denials, prior authorizations, and the insurance and payer hub.
Look aroundEvery staff view, plus analytics on revenue, patient flow, and compliance.
Look aroundHow practicing in Tracing Care compares with learning on a live patient portal.
Most people learn health technology the hard way. Patients figure it out alone with their own records on the screen. Students often meet their first EHR on the job. Tracing Care gives both a calm place to learn first, using made-up but realistic information, so no one's private health data is ever at risk.
Patients have a right to see their health information. Knowing how to use it is what makes that right real.
Nothing in Tracing Care is real, so learners can click, explore, and get it wrong without consequences. That's how confidence starts.
Instructions use everyday words. Medical terms get explained, not assumed.
Hints point to the menu first, then the button, so learners build skills they can use in any portal.
Accessibility shapes every screen from the first sketch: bigger text, strong contrast, large buttons, and phone-friendly layouts. Older adults are the first audience, not an afterthought.
Each task ends with a practical tip, like never paying a bill through a link in a text message.
Tracing Care is a practice environment. It is not a medical record, and finishing practice is not a professional certification.
Tracing Care is an active, ongoing project. Here's an honest look at what's been built, what's in progress, and what's next.
Clickable practice platform with four one-click roles (clinical, billing, administrator, patient) across 12 screens.
Two ways to learn: seven story-based guided lessons with hints and gentle feedback, or free exploring in a realistic portal.
Visual identity, logo, color palette, and a clear, phone-friendly design system, with readable type and strong contrast built in.
Add Tracing Care to a phone, tablet, or computer home screen. Practice works offline after the first visit.
Part of every design decision from the start, guided by WCAG 2.2: readable text, strong color contrast, large buttons, and keyboard-friendly controls. Each new screen is checked as it's built, including with a screen reader.
Anonymous progress tracking is built in: tasks finished, help needed, and comfort before and after. Next: first sessions with older adult learners.
New practice tasks, like reading a bill line by line, checking in for a video visit, and updating a pharmacy.
Guided tasks and the finish screen in Spanish and Portuguese.
Simple tools for library and community workshop leaders, like a printable handout and a quick reset between learners.
Guided training on the staff screens for future clinical, billing, and admin professionals.
Store versions of the practice app for iPhone and Android, built from the same site and tested with learners first.
Every statistic on this page links to its source: government data, published research, and credible industry reporting. Citations are listed here for full transparency.
In 2024, 77% of individuals were offered online access to their medical records and 65% used it. 51% of portal users accessed one on someone else's behalf, up from 24% in 2020.
Among adults 50 to 80 who don't use a portal, 35% are not confident they could log in and get around one.
Adults 60 and older filed 201,266 complaints and reported $7.748 billion in losses in 2025, up 37% and 59% from 2024. Phishing and spoofing was the most reported scam (48,064 complaints), followed by tech support scams.
49% of people who don't use a portal are not confident their data is secure on one, compared with 11% of portal users. Among non-users 55 and older, 52% said they would rather talk to a person.
697 large health data breaches affecting about 61 million people were reported in 2025. In 2024, one breach alone, at Change Healthcare, affected 192.7 million people.
Training on Epic generally requires sponsorship by a health care facility, and Epic offers no educational version for students to practice on. More than 90% of medical students and residents train on it.
Most nursing students could view the EHR but were limited in documenting in it, which the authors found leaves gaps in student learning.
Medical records specialists enter patient information into EHR systems. The field is projected to grow 8%, with about 14,000 openings each year.