17 hours ago Meaningful Use and the Patient Portal: Patient enrollment, use and satisfaction with patient portals at a later-adopting center ... As stated in MU regulations, the denominator was the … >> Go To The Portal
MU serves as a driving criterion for patient portal adoption and utilization, reflected by the 87% (66/76) of US publications that included MU criteria, irrespective of an explicit motive, and 24% (18/76) of US studies explicitly implicating MU criteria as a driving force behind their publication.
A patient portal is a secure online website that gives patients convenient, 24-hour access to personal health information from anywhere with an Internet connection. Using a secure username and password, patients can view health information such as: Recent doctor visits; Discharge summaries; Medications; Immunizations; Allergies; Lab results
No known review has systematically assessed the measurements used to investigate patient portal utilization. Objective The objective of this study was to apply systematic review criteria to identify and compare methods for quantifying and reporting patient portal use.
Finally, in lieu of assessing the methodological quality of these wide-ranging patient portal studies, we assessed quality based on two criteria: the quality of the journals in which articles were published based on their 2019 impact factor (except in one instance where the 2018 impact factor was used), and the citation count of each article.
A robust patient portal should include the following features:Clinical summaries.Secure (HIPAA-compliant) messaging.Online bill pay.New patient registration.Ability to update demographic information.Prescription renewals and contact lens ordering.Appointment requests.Appointment reminders.More items...
There are two main types of patient portals: a standalone system and an integrated service. Integrated patient portal software functionality usually comes as a part of an EMR system, an EHR system or practice management software. But at their most basic, they're simply web-based tools.
A patient portal is a secure online website that gives patients convenient, 24-hour access to personal health information from anywhere with an Internet connection. Using a secure username and password, patients can view health information such as: Recent doctor visits. Discharge summaries. Medications.
The 2014 stage 2 MU regulations require that patients themselves initiate interactions with the EHR; specifically, they require that 5% of patients 1) download or otherwise view electronic health information and 2) use secure electronic messages (e-mail).
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.
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.
About one-quarter of individuals who did not view their patient portal within the past year reported concerns about privacy and security.. About 20 percent of individuals indicated the reason they did not access their patient portal was because they were uncomfortable with computers.
What do hospitals' patient portals enable patients to do? Schedule appointments, order prescription refills, ask questions, and view test results.
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.
Meet Meaningful Use Requirements The portal must be engaging and user- friendly, and must support patient-centered outcomes. The portal also must be integrated into clinical encounters so the care team uses it to convey information, communicate with patients, and support self-care and decision-making as indicated.
In the context of health IT, meaningful use is a term used to define minimum U.S. government standards for electronic health records (EHR), outlining how clinical patient data should be exchanged between healthcare providers, between providers and insurers and between providers and patients.
CISs are computer systems that provide immediate access to current patient data regarding clinical notes, medication history, laboratory reports, images, and reports either directly or via data networks. They are parts of a hospital information system, which facilitates direct patient care.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, enacted in February 2009, includes many measures to modernize our nation’s infrastructure, one of which is the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. External file_external The HITECH Act supports the concept of meaningful use (MU) of electronic health records (EHR), an effort led by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC).
As of 2019, all EPs must use EHRs that are certified to the ONC 2015 Edition cancer reporting standards in order to use cancer reporting as one of their public health measures for incentive payments.
Population-based cancer surveillance is critical for cancer control activities aimed at reducing cancer morbidity and mortality, the second leading cause of death in the United States and the leading cause of death in Canada. Population-based public health central cancer registries (CCRs) across the U.S.
A patient portal is a secure online website, managed by a health care organization, that provides patients access to their personal health information [1-3]. Portals were developed to provide patients with a platform through which to claim ownership over their health care. For patients that adopt health care portals, usage of the portal has been shown to positively impact health outcomes [1]. Despite their introduction in the late 1990s to augment patient engagement [2], widespread adoption of patient portals was not seen until 2006 [2,4]. As of 2018, a reported 90% of health care organizations offer patients portal access, with the remaining 10% reporting plans to adopt this tool [5].
Patient use was the most commonly studied patient portal metric, analyzed in 90% (78/87) of studies. Super user designations were only found in 24% (21/87) of studies, making this the least commonly studied metric. Table 2identifies the frequency with which each metric was included in each study, with totals for each metric [6-10,18,22-102]. There were 32 different combinations of study metrics, identified in Table 3, with the two most common metric combinations being patient use/adoption, frequency, and intensity (n=9) and patient use/adoption alone (n=9). The majority of studies (53/87, 61%) analyzed three or fewer metrics, with 3.11 as the average number of metrics reported. The definitions of these 271 metrics are summarized by study in Multimedia Appendix 1.
Portal use by providers, care teams, or other staff. This use could be in terms of adoption, frequency, intensity, duration, or super user, per below; patient utilization grouped by provider practice/specialty also implies provider/practice adoption.
For coding purposes, use/adoption, frequency, duration, intensity, and super user (or similar user stratification) were considered a priori themes from which to extract definitions; provider use emerged as a theme inductively. Super user, in this context, is synonymous with high utilizer and should not be confused with the information technology standard definition implying a user with elevated privileges. All metrics were coded as binary, indicating the presence of a measure for and/or definition of each respective metric. These data were coded and recorded in a spreadsheet containing the article citation information and columns for themes of interest for both portal use metric definitions and MU criteria. Extractors’ working definitions of metric types are summarized in Table 1.
Numerous studies have investigated the relationship between patient portal utilization and health outcomes, specifically indicating a link between increased portal use and increased rates of patient engagement [6-9]. Notably, engaged individuals more actively participate in the management of their health care [10] and report enhanced patient satisfaction [11], a finding increasingly critical in patients with chronic diseases [12]. Patient portal utilization has been linked to “significant decreases in office visits…, changes in medication regimen, and better adherence to treatment” [13], along with improved chronic disease management and disease awareness [8,9]. Interestingly, even the content of patient messages was recently found to be associated with estimated readmission rates in patients with ischemic heart disease [14]. In these ways, patient portals have been cited as essential components of the solution to the cost and quality health care crisis in the United States [2].
Understanding how patient portal use has been defined and operationalized may encourage more consistent, well-defined, and perhaps more meaningful standards for utilization, informing future portal development.
Despite widespread portal interest and adoption, as well as comprehensive reviews on patient engagement with portals [2], no review has systematically assessed measurements investigating patient portal utilization. Currently, measurement of patient portal use varies widely, with inconsistent conceptual definitions serving as a consistent limitation to robust analysis [20]. Understanding how patient portal use has been defined and operationalized, both previously and currently, will encourage consistent and well-defined utilization of patient portals. Further, standardization of patient portal measurements will provide a basis from which to systematically analyze how to continue developing patient portals best suited to consumer needs.
Much of the analysis regarding Stage 3 has focused on streamlining the program. CMS narrowed the core objective list to 10, and the requirements to attest for Stage 2 have been significantly lightened.
The proposed rules for Stage 3 attempt to follow the theme of simplification applied to modify the Stage 2 rules. But just because something is easily understood doesn’t mean that it’s easily performed.
However, the provider may withhold any information from online disclosure if he or she believes that providing such information may result in significant harm.
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.
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Visit with a provider by downloading and launching the video visits app on your desktop or mobile device and following the prompts to start your appointment.
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