implementations of web patient portal 6 months after

What do you need to know about patient portal implementation?

Some customization of the system will likely be needed based on how the practice functions and the individual work styles of the various providers. For the patient portal implementation to be most beneficial, the practice will offer patient education sessions to help patients register and to familiarize them with the portal’s features.

How many patients have been registered on the patient portal?

Patient registration for the portal and the number of Web messages received and sent continues to increase. As of August 2011, approximately 9,000 patients were registered. One major challenge with the portal is the multiple step registration process.

What is an electronic patient portal?

Electronic patient portals comprise provider-tethered applications that allow patients to electronically access health information that is documented and managed by a health care institution [15]. Patient portals are owned and administered by health care institutions (such as hospitals).

Do patient requests for nonclinical information and functions affect portal development?

Health care organizations may view patient requests of nonclinical information and functions such as electronic games [18,19,24,30] as fringe requests that could raise developmental costs. However, granting these requests may improve portal adoption and use and overall patient satisfaction.

How do you implement a patient portal?

7 Steps to Implement a New Patient Portal SolutionResearch different solutions. ... Look for the right features. ... Get buy-in from key stakeholders. ... Evaluate and enhance existing workflows. ... Develop an onboarding plan. ... Successful go-live. ... Seek out painless portal migration.

What is the future of patient portals?

Patient portal adoption is growing, but beyond lab data access and some secure messaging functions, there is little drawing patients to these tools. Customizability based on patient preference or clinical need could help support patients' desires for using the tool as a bridge between them and their providers.

What are the benefits and challenges of implementing a patient portal?

What are the Top Pros and Cons of Adopting Patient Portals?Pro: Better communication with chronically ill patients.Con: Healthcare data security concerns.Pro: More complete and accurate patient information.Con: Difficult patient buy-in.Pro: Increased patient ownership of their own care.

What are two advantages of having a patient portal system?

Patient portals make tasks such as requesting prescription refills and referrals easier and more convenient leads to greater patient compliance – and when patients follow doctors' orders, clinical outcomes improve.

Are patient portals secure?

Patient portals have privacy and security safeguards in place to protect your health information. To make sure that your private health information is safe from unauthorized access, patient portals are hosted on a secure connection and accessed via an encrypted, password-protected logon.

What is the nurse's role in implementation of patient portals in healthcare?

Nurses encourage patients to enroll in the portals, wear buttons to welcome questions from patients and their families, explain the portal's privacy and security features, and demonstrate how to look up test results, send and receive provider messages, and request prescription refills.

How do patient portals contribute to patient centered care?

Further, portals help providers educate their patients and prepare them for future care encounters. When patients have access to their health data, they are better informed, and have the potential to generate deep and meaningful conversations regarding patient wellness during doctor's appointments.

What are the challenges of patient portals?

Patient portals are secure websites that give people access to their personal health information from anywhere, at any time....Table of ContentsGetting Patients to Opt-In.Security Concerns.User Confusion.Alienation and Health Disparities.Extra Work for the Provider.Conclusion.

How effective are patient portals?

While the evidence is currently immature, patient portals have demonstrated benefit by enabling the discovery of medical errors, improving adherence to medications, and providing patient-provider communication, etc. High-quality studies are needed to fully understand, improve, and evaluate their impact.

Why are patient portals so important?

The Benefits of a Patient Portal You can access all of your personal health information from all of your providers in one place. If you have a team of providers, or see specialists regularly, they can all post results and reminders in a portal. Providers can see what other treatments and advice you are getting.

How do patient portals improve patient engagement?

Patient portals have demonstrated benefit by improving adherence to medications and providing patient-provider communication. They may reduce in-person and emergency department visits, facilitate patient discovery of errors in electronic medical records (EMRs) and reduce the cost of care.

How beneficial is a new patient portal?

Your new patient portal will only be beneficial if your practice staff and patients know how to use it. Select a partner that provides consulting and onboarding to ensure you are successful with your new patient portal. This way, you can ensure you’re making the most of the new solution and taking full advantage of all the features it has to offer. Onboarding plans typically include details on training, workflow changes needed, new policies, and roles and responsibilities.

How should leading patient portals differentiate themselves?

Leading patient portals should differentiate themselves by providing proficiencies to your practice workflows. Evaluating workflows and enabling new benefits like patient self-scheduling, or pre-visit form completions can deliver significant workflow enhancements.

When did PHMG start patient portal?

PHMG launched the patient portal in early 2010. As a first step, the physician champion piloted the portal for about 6 months before it was implemented in one clinic at a time. According to the physician champion, implementation was “easier than expected because everyone was already comfortable with eClinicalWorks, ...

What are the challenges of the portal?

One major challenge with the portal is the multiple step registration process . Patients provide their e‐mail address at the front desk and are given a password to register from home. Some patients fail to complete the registration process after leaving the clinic. Remembering and managing passwords and managing family accounts are also challenging for patients. For example, a parent may log in for one child and then ask questions about a second child. For providers and staff, a challenge is that there is no way to know whether a Web‐enabled patient actually uses the portal and there are no read receipts to confirm that patients have read a message.

Why is PHMG monitoring?

Messaging is monitored periodically to ensure that communication with patients is succinct and user-friendly.

How many clinics does PHMG have?

PHMG is an independent medical group with 11 clinics in southwest Idaho, provides both appointment‐based and urgent care. PHMG has 46 health care providers (including 12 mid‐level providers) and averages 200,000 patient visits per year. About half of PHMG’s patients are appointment‐based and half are urgent care. The practice specializes in:

What is the PHMG strategy?

PHMG had a strategy of ensuring that patients hear about the portal from multiple sources during each clinical visit. To execute this strategy, PHMG used several methods of communication, including:

Why is it persuasive to use a portal?

They found that it is particularly persuasive when providers encourage patients to use the portal because patients trust providers and value their opinions. One provider says he reinforces a patient’s use of the portal by closing all messages with “Thanks for using the portal.”.

When did PHMG implement EHR?

In 2007 PHMG implemented an EHR system, eClinicalWorks, as part of a strategy to improve quality of care and facilitate coordination of care across its multiple clinic locations. In preparing for implementation, PHMG proceeded with:

How does a patient portal improve patient engagement?

Patient portals may enhance patient engagement by enabling patients to access their electronic medical records (EMRs) and facilitating secure patient-provider communication.

Why are patient portals important?

While the evidence is currently immature, patient portals have demonstrated benefit by enabling the discovery of medical errors, improving adherence to medications, and providing patient-provider communication, etc. High-quality studies are needed to fully understand, improve, and evaluate their impact.

What are the inputs and outputs of a patient portal?

The inputs are the material (eg, hardware and software) and nonmaterial (eg, leadership) components that facilitate or impair the establishment or use of the portal. Processes include the interactions of the users with the portal. Outputs comprise the results of the implementation or the use of the portal. Through the analysis, we identified 14 themes within these three categories, shown in Textbox 1.

How does patient involvement improve quality of care?

Promoting patient involvement in health care delivery may lead to improved quality and safety of care [14,15] by enabling patients to spot and report errors in EMRs, for example [6]. Some patients recognize the role of patient portals in their health care, reporting satisfaction with the ability to communicate with their health care teams and perform tasks such as requesting prescription refills conveniently [3,16]. Portal use may reduce in-person visits, visits to emergency departments, and patient-provider telephone conversations [3,8-10,12,16]. Despite the potential of portals, already used in the ambulatory setting for some time, implementation in the inpatient setting has only recently gathered momentum [17-19]. The inpatient setting presents additional challenges for implementing patient portals [18,20]. Clinical conditions leading to hospitalization are often acute and the amount of medical information generated during this time can be extensive, which may overwhelm patients [20] and challenge information technology to rapidly display this information.

How does EMR help patients?

Hospitals and other health care organizations can facilitate patient access to their EMR information through patient portals. Patient portals can provide secure, online access to personal health information [1] such as medication lists, laboratory results, immunizations, allergies, and discharge information [2]. They can also enable patient-provider communication using secure messaging, appointments and payment management, and prescription refill requests [2,3].

How many articles are in the systematic search?

The systematic search identified 58 articles for inclusion. The inputs category was addressed by 40 articles, while the processes and outputs categories were addressed by 36 and 46 articles, respectively: 47 articles addressed multiple themes across the three categories, and 11 addressed only a single theme. Nineteen articles had high- to very high-quality, 21 had medium quality, and 18 had low- to very low-quality. Findings in the inputs category showed wide-ranging portal designs; patients’ privacy concerns and lack of encouragement from providers were among portal adoption barriers while information access and patient-provider communication were among facilitators. Several methods were used to train portal users with varying success. In the processes category, sociodemographic characteristics and medical conditions of patients were predictors of portal use; some patients wanted unlimited access to their EMRs, personalized health education, and nonclinical information; and patients were keen to use portals for communicating with their health care teams. In the outputs category, some but not all studies found patient portals improved patient engagement; patients perceived some portal functions as inadequate but others as useful; patients and staff thought portals may improve patient care but could cause anxiety in some patients; and portals improved patient safety, adherence to medications, and patient-provider communication but had no impact on objective health outcomes.

What are barriers in portals?

Barriers: factors that hinder widespread adoption or portal use

Lessons From More Than A Decade In Patient Portals

Many of us look forward to a time when the experience of interacting with our health care providers will be as consumer-friendly and technology-enabled as, for example, using an ATM or Uber.

Early Implementation And Growth Of Patient Portals

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the earliest adopters of patient portals began offering electronic tools for patient-centered communication, often “tethered” to their integrated electronic health record system.

Lessons Learned

From more than a decade of experience engaging patients online, we offer four key lessons.

Moving Forward

Within 10 years, Kaiser Permanente’s patient portal has become a cornerstone of how we deliver care. According to our research, patients using the portal reported feeling:

What is the importance of educating patients about the portal?

After promoting the portal at the initial launch, it is critical to reinforce the value of using the portal and to periodically undertake promotional efforts, especially when new portal features are rolled out.

When was the NextMD portal rolled out?

Patients First leadership views the patient portal as an important way to support “patients as partners.” The NextMD patient portal was rolled out in August 2010 and serves three core functions:

Why do providers need to adjust to completing their notes at the time of service?

Providers need to adjust to completing their notes at the time of service and writing their notes in plain language because they will be read by patients, rather than relayed to patients by medical personnel. Also, providers and patients need to adjust to secure messaging as a new mode of communication.

Why is clinical summary important?

The physician expressed that “the clinical summary is a huge, huge asset to the patient and the family” because it allows information to be shared accurately and efficiently. Providers feel that the clinical summary fosters patient engagement in health care, and helps patients understand what the provider is planning.

What is bulk enrollment?

Bulk Enrollment. Another major component of the portal launch was a bulk enrollment. To achieve this, Patients First pulled e-mail addresses—which are obtained from patients routinely as part of clinic intake—for patients who were not already enrolled and uploaded them using the NextMD Bulk Enrollment Processor. A script was created to verify valid user names and enroll patients using a pair of e-mail messages; the first to welcome them to NextMD and the second to give them a temporary password and instructions on how to access the portal to create their unique password.

How many patients were enrolled in the bulk enrollment process?

The bulk enrollment process was effective (12,000 patients enrolled), however some patients were not aware they were enrolled because the enrollment message went to spam.

Why is flexibility important in clinical practice?

Allowing Flexibility Encourages Adoption. Providers have given input into the development of templates for different clinical situations and they are able to tailor the clinical summary according to their own preferences.