35 hours ago Sep 27, 2018 · Giardina: Patient portals, specifically the laboratory test result interface, would benefit from rigorous user-centered design to create an easy-to-use and meaningful interface for patients to view test results. This would allow patients to focus on making sense of their test results rather than being frustrated by usability issues or leaving the portal to search for … >> Go To The Portal
Sep 27, 2018 · Giardina: Patient portals, specifically the laboratory test result interface, would benefit from rigorous user-centered design to create an easy-to-use and meaningful interface for patients to view test results. This would allow patients to focus on making sense of their test results rather than being frustrated by usability issues or leaving the portal to search for …
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)
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...
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.Sep 29, 2017
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.Jul 2, 2020
“Tethered PHRs, also known as patient portals, allow patients to access relevant medical information from their provider,” the team wrote in its abstract.Feb 17, 2017
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.Feb 12, 2021
Vein, portal: A large vein that carries blood from the stomach and the intestines to the liver. The portal vein is formed by the union of the splenic and superior mesenteric veins. It conveys venous blood to the liver for detoxification before the blood is returned to the circulation via the hepatic veins.Mar 29, 2021
Background. 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.
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
Nurses see the portal as an additional service for patients, because it offers them the possibility for asking questions at any time and place suitable for the patient. Some nurses experience an increase in work load, because patients ask more non-urgent questions that otherwise would not be asked.Jun 15, 2012
The Portal is controlled by the source system (EMR/EHR/Hospital). On the other hand, the Personal Health Record (PHR) is more patient centric, is controlled by a patient or family member, and may or may not be connected to a doctor or hospital (i.e. it may be tethered or untethered).Sep 6, 2012
A PHR that is tied to an EHR is called a patient portal. In some but not all cases you can add information, such as home blood pressure readings, to your record via a patient portal.
Patient Portal. Web-based service that provides patients online access to their health information and allows them to communicate with their healthcare provider, schedule appointments, view billing statements, and accomplish more health-related tasks.
Other reasons to implement a portal include: To foster better patient-physician relationships: Portals offer a round-the-clock platform on which both parties can conveniently exchange health information, ask questions, and review medical notes—providing more opportunities to connect.
Highlight: Allows patients to send messages from the portal to the healthcare provider in a safe and secure manner. Provides patients with a convenient alternative to face-to-face appointments, telephone contact, letters, and e-mails to send messages.
Collect patients’ email addresses: Patients usually have to provide their email address to register for access to your portal. If you start collecting addresses early in the implementation process, you’ll be able to hit the ground running once the portal goes live.
Electronic health records change the landscape of patient data sharing and privacy by increasing the amount of information collected and stored and the number of potential recipients.
As a nation, we are making progress toward the goal of seamless, user-transparent, cross-organizational health data exchange.
This study is part of a larger project investigating patient sharing and access preferences to electronic health records. This portion of the study is the interview, which focused on understanding patient preferences for, attitudes about, and strategies for managing the privacy of a patient's EHR and the design implications thereof.
The 30 participants in this study were the same as reported in Caine and Hanania. 14 Enrolled patients were 73 % women, 30 % minority (African-American or Multiracial), and had a mean age of 46 ± 12 (SD) years.
Our results, when viewed in combination with the ONC for Health Information Technology (HIT)’s privacy and security framework—eight principles that serve as a data collection framework for the protection of consumer privacy 21 —suggest six implications for the design of a patient-centered 22 tool allowing patients to control disclosure of their EHR data.
Our study suggests the need for and key characteristics of design of a patient-accessible EHR that places privacy control in the users’ hands. We have identified three interaction methods that enable information access control, as well as two specific features that promise to aid the user: contextual privacy controls and access notifications.
We are grateful to Sheri Alpert, Peter Schwartz, Aaron Carroll, Jere Odell, Mike Barnes, Jon Duke, Jeff Friedlin, Doug Martin, Michele Degges, Morgan Soladine, Denise Anthony, Kay Connelly, Crystal Boston, Nathan Mihalik, Brenda Hudson, Jane Anne French, Patrick McGuire, Laura Yorger, Bedellion Armstrong, Kelli Givens, Genesis Thomas, Jennifer Hutchenson, Allison Stieneker, Theda Miller, Chris Power and Marc Overhage.
Patient portals are intended to engage patients by giving them access to medical information ; however, if patients are unable to understand the information or the system is not usable, patients will not take advantage of them. Despite several aforementioned drawbacks, apps have used evolving innovative designs to engage consumers and offer unique features and functions that could be translated to patient portal design. For instance, Apple's ResearchKit's Diabetes app pings the user daily to update disease and symptom-related information. Check-in questions or user-friendly alerts in portals could similarly be explored for engaging more patients their health care. Alerts could ask if the patient understands an abnormal result, direct them to helpful resources, and encourage test result follow-up. Finally, test results in the portal need to be easily understood by laypeople or displayed using simplified medical terms. For example, a portal might display elevated cholesterol as "↑LDL cholesterol," or even just display the number without a flag, whereas a health app may label it as “bad cholesterol.”
This statement accompanies the article Patient portals and health apps: Pitfalls, promises, and what one might learn from the other authored by Jessica L. Baldwin and co-authored by Hardeep Singh, Dean F. Sittig, Traber Davis Giardina and submitted to Healthcare as an Article Type. Authors collectively affirm that this manuscript represents original work that has not been published and is not being considered for publication elsewhere.We also affirm that all authors listed contributed significantly to the project and manuscript. Furthermore we confirm that none of our authors have disclosures and we declare noconflict of interest.
Widespread use of health information technology (IT) could potentially increase patients’ access to their health information and facilitate future goals of advancing patient-centered care. Despite having increased access to their health data, patients do not always understand this information or its implications, ...
There is growing interest in electronic access to health information and the use of digital data for both disease and health-related tracking. Widespread use of health information technology (IT) could potential ly increase patients’ access to their health information and facilitate future goals of advancing patient-centered care.1 For example, health IT can be used to facilitate information exchange with clinicians and instruct patients when to act upon clinical issues, such as out of range physiologic parameters, follow-up of test results, and complications of medication use. 2 Tools such as personal health records, patient portals, and various mobile health (mHealth) applications (apps) have been developed to help patients engage in their own care. Already, a significant number of patients use health IT; therefore, it is essential that patient-facing health IT be tailored to their needs. In this paper, we discuss two forms of patient-facing health IT tools—patient portals and apps—to highlight how, despite several limitations of each, combining high-yield features of mHealth apps with portals could increase patient engagement and self-management and be more effective than either of them alone. This could potentially improve both patient experience and outcomes related to patient-facing health IT.
In June 2014, Apple announced the HealthKit cloud application programming interface (API) and its partnership with Epic (Verona, WI), an electronic health record vendor who also makes MyChart (a popular patient portal), and the Mayo Clinic (Rochester, MN).
Patient portals often are designed in concert with other health care system functions such as scheduling appointments and communicating securely with providers . According to Walker, Sieck, Menser and colleagues , offering a variety of functions is a central component of patient engagement, particularly for patients attempting to self-manage chronic conditions.
In a 2018 national survey, older adults (50-80 years) commonly cited the following reasons for not setting up a patient portal: 1 Did not like communicating about their health by computer (40%) 2 Did not have a need for a portal (38%) 3 Did not know they needed to set something up (33%) 4 Had not gotten around to setting up a portal (29%) 5 Did not feel comfortable with technology (26%)
Presently she works as a senior analyst and Clinical lead at RTI International in the Quality Measurement and Health Policy Program. She has expertise in patient/resident assessment-based and electronic health record (EHR)-based quality measures. She recently led the development of a measure of the transfer of health information for 4 post acute care settings, through a multi-year measure development process. The measure concept is the transfer of a medication list, and will be implemented in 2020. Through this work, and as a high user of her patient portal, Colene developed a keen interest in the adoption and use of patient-facing tools such as patient portals.
Patient portals are considered valuable conduits for supporting patients’ self-management. However, it is unknown why they often fail to impact on health care processes and outcomes.
We used Coiera’s ‘information value chain’ as the theoretical framework [ 26] to guide our study selection and data synthesis. This theoretical framework was especially suitable for our study because it conceptualizes in five steps how the use of a health information system of any type might lead to a change in health outcomes [ 26 ]. Also, a main feature of the information value chain relevant to our study aim is that each step can be evaluated and quantified on its own, with positive results in one step increasing the likelihood of obtaining improvements in the next steps.
Ultimately, these decisions may alter the process of care (step 4), such as a change in utilisation of the health care resources, patient activation or medication prescriptions.
First, we adopted a specific perspective to investigate our research question by choosing Coiera’s information value chain. Although it is an established theoretical framework that effectively describes the evaluation of informatics systems, our findings have been biased towards the steps of that chain . This implies that other aspects that are likely to influence whether patient portals lead to improved health outcomes, such as socio-economic factors and health system characteristics , were out of scope for our review. Second, identifying studies for some steps in the chain may have been easier than for others. Whilst we used a comprehensive strategy and used multiple search terms to address each step, we cannot exclude that our search strategy was more sensitive towards steps with more text words and MeSH terms available. Third, we did not perform the data extraction in duplicate. Therefore, this phase of the reviewing process might have been more prone to errors than the others; it was up to the discretion of the primary reviewer to discuss items that were less straightforward to extract and that required more interpretation.
There are two options for setting up a patient portal. The first option is a functional Patient Portal, which is included with OpenEMR (The Native Patient Portal). The second option is using the CMS patient portal, which utilizes a set of APIs included within OpenEMR.
This is a fully functional onsite (meaning served from the same site as OpenEMR) patient portal.
The CMS Patient Portal, developed by Sunset Systems, is an interface from OpenEMR to a content management system such as WordPress. Initially only WordPress is supported, and for simplicity the remainder of this document will focus on that.
Patient engagement factors heavily in the future of healthcare services, from both the perspective of Meaningful Use regulations and in the context of using an EHR to provide more cost efficient services and improve the quality of care. Research reported by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality shows that when patients are not engaged in their care, practices waste resources due to repetitive patient education efforts, increased diagnostic tests, and a greater need for referrals. Furthermore, the research shows increases in patient engagement have been linked improved patient outcomes across a number of metrics and have been shown to reduce the rate of preventable readmissions.
Back and forth communication between patients and providers is key to patient education and for handling problems related to confusion regarding care beyond the office. An EHR patient portal should offer an easy to use messaging system that can allow communication directly to and from parties involved in patient care.