is it ethical for patient portal to require patient to sign up for coupons

by Mr. Chad Rowe II 9 min read

Patient Portals and the HIPAA Security Rule - Compliancy …

36 hours ago  · Under the Security Rule, covered entities (CEs) and business associates (BAs) must develop effective administrative, technical, and physical safeguards to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of ePHI – including patient portal ePHI. Patient portal apps and software must be secure, or be rendered secure. >> Go To The Portal


Why don’t patients sign up for a patient portal?

 · Under the Security Rule, covered entities (CEs) and business associates (BAs) must develop effective administrative, technical, and physical safeguards to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of ePHI – including patient portal ePHI. Patient portal apps and software must be secure, or be rendered secure.

Is patient access to test results online ethical?

 · 3. Include a link to the portal when patients sign in. If you have automated sign in for patients when they arrive for an appointment, provide a link on the sign in sheet so they can easily register while they wait. Patients want convenience and ease, and if the portal is already in front of them they will be more likely to sign up. 4. Link ...

How can I use the patient portal to promote patient appointments?

A patient should only need one portal – a comprehensive one maintained by his or her primary care physician (PCP), who shares data with all those specialists and …

Do you need more than one portal for patient information?

Patient portals allow patients to contact providers about small concerns that would otherwise require a time-consuming and potentially costly office visit. Improved communications improve patient satisfaction which usually leads to improved outcomes. See exscribe, Orthopaedic Healthcare Solutions, EHR/EMR, Orthopedic News “4 benefits of ...

What are the disadvantages of patient portals?

Even though they should improve communication, there are also disadvantages to patient portals....Table of ContentsGetting Patients to Opt-In.Security Concerns.User Confusion.Alienation and Health Disparities.Extra Work for the Provider.Conclusion.

What does Hipaa have to say about patient portals?

Online patient portals allow patients to view their medical records, schedule appointments, and even request refills of prescriptions, anywhere the patient has access to the Internet. Patient portals contain information that constitutes electronic protected health information (ePHI) under the HIPAA Security Rule.

What is the most common barrier to the use of the patient portal?

Conclusions: The most common barriers to patient portal adoption are preference for in-person communication, not having a need for the patient portal, and feeling uncomfortable with computers, which are barriers that are modifiable and can be intervened upon.

Why do patients not use patient portals?

About seven in 10 individuals cited their preference to speak with their health care provider directly as a reason for not using their patient portal within the past year. About one-quarter of individuals who did not view their patient portal within the past year reported concerns about privacy and security..

Are patient portals confidential?

Yes, many patient portals are secure as they have security and privacy safeguards to keep your information protected. To ensure your data remains protected from any unauthorized access, these healthcare portals are hosted on a secure connection and can be accessed via a password-protected login.

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 are the benefits and challenges of using patient portals?

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 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.

What are the benefits of patient portals?

The truth is, there are a lot of benefits to using a patient portal for providers.Better Patient Communication. ... Streamline Patient Registration and Administrative Tasks. ... Greater Focus on Patient Care. ... Better Patient-Physician Relationships. ... Improve Clinical Outcomes. ... Optimize Medical Office Workflow.

What is a reason for providers to be reluctant to use a patient portal?

The reason why most patients do not want to use their patient portal is because they see no value in it, they are just not interested. The portals do not properly incentivize the patient either intellectually (providing enough data to prove useful) or financially.

Do patients like patient portals?

Eight studies reported that patients or their caregivers want more portal education, training, or support. Two studies found that their participants want human connection as they learn about the portal and how to use it, as well as when they encounter issues.

Do patient portals improve healthcare?

Engaging patients in the delivery of health care has the potential to improve health outcomes and patient satisfaction. Patient portals may enhance patient engagement by enabling patients to access their electronic medical records (EMRs) and facilitating secure patient-provider communication.

Why Would Your Medical Practice Be Penalized?

A 2009 federal law offered incentives that encouraged medical practices to adopt electronic medical records. These incentives gave money to Medicare or Medicaid providers who made specific progress toward forming certified electronic medical records between 2011 and 2015.

What is a Patient Portal?

A patient portal provides patients with secure online access to parts of their medical record. Patient portals also provide health information and services that help patients better look after their health, such as exchanging messages with care providers, refilling prescriptions, completing forms online, paying bills and scheduling appointments.

What Your Patient Portal Needs

The law doesn’t specify patient portals, but patient portals are the only means to fulfill many of the requirements. The law establishes Stage 2 meaningful use requirements. Stage 2 meaningful use requirements include 17 required features and 6 additional features that must be included in certified electronic health records.

Patient Portal Benefits

In addition to being a legal requirement, patient portals aim to improve patient-provider communication and patient education. This makes patients more informed about their health, making office visits more productive and beneficial for patients and providers, as well as improving care.

Get Your Secure, Regulatory-Compliant Patient Portal

The law requires that 5% of your patients use the patient portal. If you’re going to fulfill this requirement, your patient portal must be secure and easy to use. ACS, Inc. Web Design & SEO’s usability experts prioritize user-friendliness.

Why don't patients sign up for patient portal?

One of the main reasons patients don’t sign up for a patient portal is that they truly don’t know it exists. Fix that by adding the link to sign up on every bit of correspondence you send, whether through the physical mail or email.

How to encourage patients to register on a patient portal?

Offering incentives can be a good way to encourage not only registration on your patient portal but also utilization of it. Consider things like offering a gift card for the first ten people who schedule appointments through the portal every month, or randomly enter newly-registered patients for a gift card drawing. Your incentives need not be extravagant. But, they can provide the extra push patients need to actively engage with the portal.

How to enroll patients who haven't responded to your other strategies?

If your patient portal offers bulk enrollment, it can be a great way to enroll patients who haven’t responded to your other strategies. Upload all unenrolled patient emails into the portal, then send a reminder email for patients to pick a username and password (some portals let you assign a temporary username and password).

What are the benefits of patient portals?

Other benefits of patient portals include: 1 Better adherence to treatment plans 2 Fewer visits to the doctor for minor issues 3 Increased patient focus on preventative care 4 Easier recordkeeping and safe storage of medical records

How to boost patient portal engagement?

Let’s face it: the best way to boost patient portal engagement is to offer useful and engaging content. Use patient demographics and other information such as national health months (e.g., heart disease, breast cancer, etc.) to generate content that empowers and educates patients. Make sure patients understand that lab results and visit summaries will be delivered via the patient portal as well.

Why are patient portals important?

These two benefits alone are important for patients who are managing a complicated condition and need to visit multiple doctors.

What is patient portal?

Patient portals are a relatively new way to improve communication between healthcare providers and their patients , with an estimated 92% of U.S. hospitals on board as of 2016.

Why don't patients sign up for a portal?

I often ask patients why they don't sign up. Some are worried about privacy; others don't enjoy using computers, forget their passwords, or just don't see the benefits. They aren't thinking ahead to that unplanned emergency department visit where a portal would let them pull up their medication, allergy, and problem lists on their phone for the doctor to see. Many patients are simply more comfortable calling to make appointments and leaving messages. Old habits are hard to change.

How can portals help patients?

Yet, if we can get patients to use them, portals have a lot of potential benefits. Allowing patients to access their records can make them more informed. Asynchronous communication can be more efficient. Having a patient write down their concerns in their own words rather than relying on a third party can improve accuracy. Sending test results electronically can be more timely.

How many portals do patients need?

A patient should only need one portal – a comprehensive one maintained by his or her primary care physician (PCP), who shares data with all those specialists and hospitals, gets timely updates, and is great at keeping records.

Is it better to send test results electronically?

Sending test results electronic ally can be more timely . However, the current state of the art needs work. A big problem is that portals are not standardized and often don't talk to each other.

What are the privacy concerns of patient portals?

The main privacy issues involve the aforementioned patient right of access and their right to request correction and/or amendment.

Why do we need portals?

Allowing patients to make appointments themselves on the portal and request medication refills helps streamline otherwise time-consuming tasks. Improve communications.

How to keep HIPAA compliance documentation?

Jon included tabs in the three-ring binder for everything that you need to document and a checklist for each tab. I recommend adding the date that you check off each item in each checklist, as one of our clients suggested to us.

Is the patient portal a form?

The patient portal will not be every patient’s requested form or format. Thus, the covered entity must continue to provide alternatives, such as hard copies, CDs, or email attachments.

Does HIPAA require a hard copy?

Other than the access issue raised above, generally speaking, HIPAA provides that individuals are entitled to a copy in the form or format that they request, if readily producible. If not readily producible, the covered entity’s default is to produce a hard copy or an electronic copy, depending on whether it maintains the requested protected health information (“PHI”) electronically.

Does a portal send out reminders?

Reduced incidence of no shows. Most portals have the capability to send emailed appointment reminders and patients appreciate the ease of scheduling appointments.

Do you have to have proper security on a portal?

And, of course, you must have proper physical, technical, and administrative security on the equipment used to run the portal.

What is EHR portal?

Electronic health records (EHR) now include patient portals where patients can obtain clinical reports, including notes, radiology reports, and laboratory/anatomic pathology results. Although portals increase patient access to information, no guidelines have been developed for hospitals about appropriate delays in posting different types ...

Why is EHR important?

An important goal of EHR is to have a record that is easily accessed at any medical center for any patient. Access to laboratory values could allow patients to get second opinions more easily. Having results available to other physicians might minimize unnecessary test duplication [6].

What is EHR in healthcare?

The nationally mandated use of electronic health records (EHR) has resulted in both new opportunities and challenges regarding patients’ access to their clinical information. In this era of online patient portals, not only can patients look up their upcoming appointments or request medication refills, they can also see results of clinical laboratory and anatomic pathology testing. While patients have a right to know the contents of their health record, ethical and clinical concerns arise about the timing of results’ availability and potential harms stemming from early access to results without a clinician to help interpret and contextualize those results. Currently, access to results and the timeframe in which they become available vary among institutions [1]. Benefits of access must be weighed against the risks of patients’ possible misinterpretation of results and the emotional sequelae and stress that could occur when patients learn of abnormal results without adequate clinical guidance.

Why is extra time for counseling important?

However, it could also be argued from ethical and clinical perspectives that results of HIV tests should be communicated as soon as they are available, since partners of patients would be at risk and could be told.

What are the benefits of access to lab results?

Patients can benefit from access to routine laboratory results, such as complete blood counts (CBC), cholesterol results, and standard chemistries (e.g., sodium and potassium). Some of this information could be helpful, especially hemoglobin A1c (used in diagnosing and monitoring control of diabetes) and cholesterol values, if patients wish to have these results available for future reference or in tracking any improvement over time. For example, a patient taking a statin to lower cholesterol could benefit from easy access to prior test results. Liver enzymes would also be relevant when taking a statin since liver and muscle damage can be serious side effects. Of course, physicians should also be monitoring these results closely and discussing them with their patients, but some patients might have more peace of mind knowing of abnormal results more quickly or having easy access to the actual values.

When are anatomic pathology and cytopathology reports generated?

Anatomic pathology and cytopathology reports are generated when patients undergo a tissue biopsy, resection, or fine needle aspiration. These are the types of reports that are used when cancer is diagnosed or staged (i.e., when the extent of a cancer’s location in the body is determined).

How long are inpatient results held?

For example, inpatient results are posted to the portal 24-28 hours after they are completed. Outpatient results are held for variable periods of time depending on the type of result. Point-of-care testing results (e.g., pregnancy tests, glucose) are released on the same day they are performed. Routine laboratory results are released in 3-4 days.

What is EHR incentive?

The Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs encourage patient involvement in their health care. Online access to health information allows patients to make informed decisions about their care and share their most recent clinical information with other health care providers and personal caregivers.

Can a provider withhold information from a patient's website?

However, the provider may withhold any information from online disclosure if he or she believes that providing such information may result in significant harm.

Can a patient opt out of health information?

A: A patient can choose not to access their health information, or “opt-out.” Patients cannot be removed from the denominator for opting out of receiving access. If a patient opts out, a provider may count them in the numerator if they have been given all the information necessary to opt back in without requiring any follow up action from the provider, including, but not limited to, a user ID and password, information on the patient website, and how to create an account.

Can a group practice share credit?

A: Yes. Eligible professionals in group practices are able to share credit to meet the patient electronic access threshold if they each saw the patient during the EHR reporting period and they are using the same certified EHR technology. The patient can only be counted in the numerator by all of these eligible professionals if the patient views, downloads, or transmits their health information online. See the FAQ.

Does CMS require growth charts?

However, because this certification capability is not required, eligible professionals and hospitals do not need to generate and make growth charts available in order to meet the objective.

The cost-benefit analysis

"The portal charge represents an incremental and recurring revenue stream for the practice in an era of challenging financial pressures like rising operating expenses and decreasing reimbursement," said Stephen Armstrong, senior vice president for Hello Health, in an e-mail to Healthcare Dive.

Consumer resistance?

Yet for physicians who aren't charging, the fear that some patients may be resistant to paying a fee is a legitimate one.