patient portal capabilities

Key capabilities for Patient access include:

• Provide access: Give patients an easy-to-use portal to access their health information.
• Direct engagement: Enable patients to engage through automated chat conversations that hand off to your patient service...
• Scheduling and messaging: Let your patients schedule appointments and send messages to their providers.

Full Answer

What are the benefits of a patient portal?

Jul 24, 2019 · In order to help you evaluate common portal capabilities, we asked patients which portal features they would need the most: Scheduling appointments online Viewing health information (e.g., lab results or clinical notes) Viewing bills/making payments Checking prescription refills/requests Filling out pre-visit forms (e.g., intake form)

What features attract patients to a portal?

the following capabilities are available on the patient portal: • message some providers • view upcoming appointments • access your health summary, medical history, and visit history • view current conditions and allergies • view procedure and lab results • view your medications, including guidelines, side effects, and precautions • complete …

How many patients have access to a patient portal?

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 …

How do I choose the right patient portal for my business?

Patient Portal Capabilities Patient Portal We are pleased to announce our new secure patient portal MyHealthRecord.com. It is your health record and connection to our practice from any device such as tablets, smartphones, and desktop computers. Whether you use an iPhone, Android tablet, or full desktop computer,

What do patient portals offer?

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.Sep 29, 2017

What are the five main features of the new healthcare portal?

5 Key Features Every Patient Portal Needs to OfferExcellent user experience. ... Branding flexibility. ... Flexible financing options. ... Loyalty rewards and incentives. ... Integration with existing systems.May 12, 2020

What is the advantage of a patient portal for the patient?

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.Aug 13, 2020

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.Feb 17, 2016

What makes the patient portal different from a PHR?

A tethered PHR, as defined by the ONC, is an online interface tied to an EHR with which patients may view and sometimes interact with their health data. ... 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.Feb 17, 2017

How do you make a patient portal?

4 Steps to Successful Patient Portal Adoption, IntegrationOutline clinic or hospital needs, goals.Select a patient portal vendor.Create provider buy-in.Market the patient portal to end-users.Jun 6, 2017

Do patient portals improve outcomes?

Patient portal interventions lead to improvements in a wide range of psychobehavioral outcomes, such as health knowledge, self-efficacy, decision making, medication adherence, and preventive service use.

What safeguards are included in patient portals?

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 goal of hie?

Electronic health information exchange (HIE) allows doctors, nurses, pharmacists, other health care providers and patients to appropriately access and securely share a patient's vital medical information electronically—improving the speed, quality, safety and cost of patient care.Jul 24, 2020

What are the risks of a patient portal?

Some of these risks include: reliance on the patient portal as a sole method of patient communication; patient transmission of urgent/emergent messages via the portal; the posting of critical diagnostic results prior to provider discussions with patients; and possible security breaches resulting in HIPAA violations.Mar 1, 2021

What are some benefits of telehealth?

Advantages of telehealth Using technology to deliver health care has several advantages, including cost savings, convenience, and the ability to provide care to people with mobility limitations, or those in rural areas who don't have access to a local doctor or clinic.Oct 12, 2020

Why do some patients fail to participate in the use of the 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.

Know Your Options

Evaluate your options and create a long-term strategy. By assessing the full range of portal components, you can then determine which capabilities will best suit your practice.

Registering

Save the patient time in the office. When registration is completed prior to an appointment, patients spend less time in the waiting room and more time engaged in their care.

Secure Messaging

When your patient portal is integrated with your EHR system, secure messaging provides an efficient way to exchange information with both patients and other providers.

Providing Educational Materials

Diagnoses and treatment plans can be difficult for patients to understand and remember. In order to reinforce this information, practices have been giving patients supplemental printed materials for years. And now, with a portal, patients can access these materials online.

Ask for Patient Feedback

It is important to communicate with your patients and ask for feedback about your practice’s performance and services—including your patient portal. In order to get tips from them for making the portal more useful, Ms.

How to improve patient portal?

In addition, patients’ presence on patient portals unlocks for them the opportunities to: 1 schedule appointments hassle-free 2 improve their health awareness with a wide range of educational resources 3 communicate with healthcare professionals directly 4 get valuable insights in their health history with a variety of data.

Why are patient portals important?

One of the top benefits of patient portal usage is dramatic increase of patient engagement due to opening various possibilities of involvement for patients in their healthcare upon patient portal activation and utilization.

What is the ultimate requirement for compliance with HIPAA regulations?

It should be noted that the ultimate requirement for compliance with HIPAA regulations demands that all patient portal vendors ensure the restricted access to protected health information by enabling the usage of a secure username and the strong password for each individual user.

Why is patient engagement important in healthcare?

According to the World Health Organization Report, patient engagement became an integral component of healthcare as patients once involved in the process are more capable of taking informed decisions in favor of healthcare awareness.

What is online appointment scheduling?

Online Appointment Scheduling is one of the most important features on patient portal as it enables patients, regardless of their actual location, to make an appointment on a certain date or on those time slots that suit patients best.

Why are portals beneficial?

Portals are beneficial in terms of managing the process of patient registration with ease. Patient portals enable easy-to-perform sign in to get access to the records or complete patient forms for having a test, getting insights with health history data, tapping in immunization records, or lists of prescribed medication lists.

What is a prescription refill?

Prescription Refills. The ongoing treatment, repeated medical procedures often require that the patient has access to Prescription Refills. By facilitating this process, healthcare professionals can expect improvement of patient engagement.

Summary

Patient medical records are now digitized across nearly all hospitals in the U.S. (3).

Definitions

Non-federal acute care hospital: Hospitals that meet the following criteria: acute care general medical and surgical, children’s general, and cancer hospitals owned by private/not-for-profit, investor-owned/for-profit, or state/local government and located within the 50 states and District of Columbia.

Data Source and Methods

Data are from the American Hospital Association (AHA) Information Technology (IT) Supplement to the AHA Annual Survey. Since 2008, ONC has partnered with the AHA to measure the adoption and use of health IT in U.S. hospitals. ONC funded the 2019 AHA IT Supplement to track hospital adoption and use of EHRs and the exchange of clinical data.

Acknowledgements

The authors are with the Office of Technology, within the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

Suggested Citation

Johnson C. & Barker W. (June 2021). Hospital Capabilities to Enable Patient Electronic Access to Health Information, 2019. ONC Data Brief, no.55. Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology: Washington DC

What is the ONC certification program?

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) Health IT Certification Program certifies health information technology (IT) that enables patient access to their electronic medical record (1). Starting in 2014, hospitals were incentivized by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Program to adopt certified health IT that enabled patients to electronically view, download, and transmit their health information. In 2019, CMS required hospitals to provide their patients with the ability to access their health information via an application programming interface (API) using an app of their choice (2). This data brief presents the latest national estimates on the proportion of U.S. hospitals that enabled patient electronic access to their health information.

What percentage of hospitals allow outpatients to view their health information?

 Among hospitals that provided outpatient care, 97 percent enabled outpatients to view their health information in a patient portal, 95 percent enabled outpatients to download their health information, and 75 percent enabled them to transmit their health information to a third party.

What is a non-federal acute care hospital?

Non-federal acute care hospital: Hospitals that meet the following criteria: acute care general medical and surgical, children’s general, and cancer hospitals owned by private/not-for-profit, investor-owned/for-profit, or state/local government and located within the 50 states and District of Columbia.

How many hospitals allow access to health information?

 Nine in 10 hospitals enabled patients to view their health information across all outpatient care sites; whereas less than one in 10 hospitals enabled access across some outpatient sites.

What is the AHA IT supplement?

hospitals. ONC funded the 2019 AHA IT Supplement to track hospital adoption and use of EHRs and the exchange of clinical data.

How many hospitals use the same EHR?

 Seven in 10 hospitals that provide outpatient care reported that they use the same EHR across all outpatient sites, whereas three in 10 reported they used a different EHR across practice sites.