How to download your lab results from the athenahealth Patient Portal

Many independent practices and smaller medical groups run on athenahealth. If your doctor’s portal says “powered by athenahealth,” or you sign in with an athenahealth account, this is the guide for you.

The portal usually carries your practice’s name, but the account behind it belongs to athenahealth. athenahealth calls it a universal login: one account works at every practice that uses athenahealth, though each practice still has its own portal page. (athenahealth: account for Patient Portal users)

Here are four ways to get your results out. Menu names below follow athenahealth’s own help pages as of October 2026. Practices can customize their portals, so if a name does not match what you see, look for the nearest equivalent.

1. Download your health record

The portal can package your record as a file. athenahealth’s steps:

1. Sign in to your practice’s Patient Portal.
2. On the left side of the screen, select My Health.
3. Near the top of the page, select the Health Records tab.
4. Choose a time frame: Custom date range, Single date, or All time.
5. On the Download tab, which is selected by default, select Download.

The portal saves a .zip file containing your health record. (athenahealth help: download and transmit health records) The same page has an Email tab, which sends a one-time link to an address you enter, and a Direct Exchange tab for sending the record straight to another provider.

Best for: most people. It is the portal’s built-in way to get a copy of everything.

What you get: a continuity of care document (CCD), the standard format for moving records between systems. athenahealth says this is the document patients get from the Health Records page. (athenahealth help: continuity of care document)

Things to know:

• One practice at a time. The download covers the practice whose portal you are in. If you see several athenahealth practices, download from each one.
• Long ranges can fail. One hospital’s help page suggests downloading a year at a time if All time gives an error. (Osceola Medical Center)
• Viewing is not downloading. You can read results on the Test Results tab, and in the athenaPatient phone app under Results. athenahealth’s help pages do not describe a download button for a single result, so use the Health Records download to keep a copy.

HealthViewer reads CCD files and ZIPs of them, so you can upload the download without unzipping it. It also reads athenahealth summary PDFs if your practice printed your record for you.

2. Connect an app to your athenahealth account

athenahealth lets you connect a personal health record app. You sign in to the app with your athenahealth account and choose what to share, and the app fetches your results as data, with the test name, value, unit, reference range, and date for each one. athenahealth says no app can see your information until you sign in and grant it access. (athenahealth: Patient Portal FAQ)

Best for: anyone who wants an ongoing, chartable copy that stays up to date.

Things to know:

• Your practice can turn apps off. athenahealth notes that a practice may have disabled a given app. If a connection fails, ask the practice to enable it.
• You can revoke access. Open your name, then Security Settings, then athenahealth Profile, and edit Privacy Settings. Revoking stops future access, but athenahealth notes the app may keep data it already downloaded.

HealthViewer’s health system connection works with athenahealth. Since athenahealth requires each practice to enable patient apps, HealthViewer gives you a request you can send to the office, with setup steps for their administrator.

3. Get the report from the lab

Most practices do not run bloodwork themselves. They send it to an outside lab, often Quest or Labcorp, and the lab issues its own report. That report is usually what you see in the portal, and you can get the original from the lab directly.

Best for: a long history, or tests ordered by a practice whose portal you can no longer reach.

Things to know: the lab’s copy covers every doctor who sent you there, not just this one. See how to download your lab results from Quest and from Labcorp.

4. Request a copy of your medical records

For the complete record, ask the practice directly. The portal belongs to the practice, not to athenahealth, so the request goes to the office.

Best for: results the practice has not released to the portal, notes and documents the download leaves out, or records for someone else.

Things to know: this is a legal right, not a courtesy. Under 45 CFR 164.524, providers must respond within 30 calendar days, with one 30-day extension allowed if they tell you in writing why, and can charge only a reasonable, cost-based fee for copies. (HHS guidance on the right of access)

Which one should you use?

For most people the answer is the Health Records download, repeated now and then to pick up new results. If your practice turns on app access, a connection saves you the repeat downloads.

Things that can be missing

• Results your practice has not published. athenahealth’s portal help says it is up to your provider to release results, and only results considered appropriate for release appear. The phone app notes the same thing. (athenaPatient app help)
• Family members. Children under 13 cannot have their own portal account. A parent or caregiver gets family access through the practice, which decides what that access includes.
• Other practices. Each practice’s download holds only its own records, even if you use one athenahealth login for all of them.

After you download

A few checks save confusion later:

• Duplicates. A test can show up twice: once in the practice’s record and once in the lab’s own report. Keep one.
• Dates. The CCD usually records when your sample was collected, while a lab PDF may also show the report date. The same result can appear a day or two apart.
• Reference ranges. Each lab sets its own. Keep the range that came with each result rather than applying one lab’s range to every value.

Once the results are in one place, the next step is reading them as a history rather than one report at a time. How to track your lab results over time walks through that, and Where should your lab results live? compares the places you can keep them. If you want a private place for all of it, HealthViewer is a lab results tracker that stores everything in an encrypted file on your own computer.

athenahealth and athenaPatient are trademarks of athenahealth, Inc. HealthViewer is not affiliated with or endorsed by athenahealth. Menu names and available features vary by practice. This post is general information, not legal advice.