verbiage to increase patient portal

How can I encourage patients to use the patient portal?

Require all patients to email their provider only through their patient portal. Offer patients a discount on their next optical purchase if they sign up for the patient portal while in your office. Offer patients a discount off their bill if they pay their bills via their patient portal.

Is your doctor’s Patient Portal easy to navigate?

For instance, Tracy Vega, co-founder of a self-defense consultancy, started using her doctor’s patient portal six months ago, but found that, “It’s not easy to navigate, it does not alert you/send an email when you have a message waiting. You have to continuously log back in and check manually for any new messages or replies.”

How many patients actually use patient portals?

According to research from the Annals of Family Medicine, only 25% of primary care patients will sign up for and use a patient portal when their doctor makes one available. These aren’t great numbers.

How do you encourage patients to engage?

Encourage and incentivize. Always include a link to the patient portal to engage patients and initiate interactions. Send targeted health information to specific patients, such as diabetes management. Require all patients to email their provider only through their patient portal.

How would you encourage patients to use patient portal?

Here are nine ways to improve patient portal engagement.Enroll at the first appointment. ... Auto-enroll to schedule online appointments. ... Include a link to the portal when patients sign in. ... Link your portal sign up on all correspondence. ... Optimize for desktop and mobile. ... Empower all staff to sign patients up. ... Offer incentives.More items...•

How can I increase my patient load?

Creative Ways To Increase Patient VolumeInvest in a High-Quality Medical Website. ... Optimize the Practice Website for SEO. ... Advertise On Google Ads & Social Media. ... Build an Online Community on Social Media. ... Grow New Patient Referral with Physician Liaison Marketing. ... Protect Your Physician Reputation & Generate Reviews.

How can patient compliance with portal registration be increased?

Offer an incentive for patient registration, such as entering the patient's name in a drawing for a prize (such as a restaurant gift card) or offering an incentive (such as a movie ticket or waived co-pay). Host a contest for staff, awarding a prize for the employee who signs up the most new patients for the portal.

What makes a great patient portal?

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.

How can patient scheduling be improved?

9 tips for scheduling patients effectively: Use appointment scheduling software. Establish an appointment reminder system. Implement a patient waiting list to fill no-shows or cancellations. Use broadcast messages.

How can a hospital increase client base?

How to Build a Customer Base in the Healthcare IndustryReferrals from Patients. Take good care of the patients you have. ... Referrals from Other Doctors. The family doctor I am with now was referred to me by a doctor who had too much business. ... Online Marketing. ... Volunteer Your Skills. ... Ask for Reviews.

How do patient portals improve patient outcomes?

Most of the portal interventions used tailored alerts or educational resources tailored to the patient's condition. 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 is the nurse's role in implementation of patient portals in healthcare?

Nurses occupy the frontline of patient communication. They play a critical role in encouraging patients to use portals by explaining the benefits, demonstrating their use, and providing reliable information about their security.

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.

What information is included in a patient portal?

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.

What are the five C's for correctly entering information into a medical record?

What are the five C's for correctly entering information into a medical record?... Concise. Complete. Clear. Correct. Chronologically ordered.

Improving Care with Patient Portals

Patients can sometimes feel overwhelmed during a doctor’s appointment, whether due to unexpected news or complex medical terminology. Fortunately, patient portals allow providers to share clinical summaries after a screening or check-up, so patients can then easily reference their medical history or lab results on their own time.

Understanding Low Portal Adoption Rates

As helpful as this technology can be, it still isn’t being used to its full potential. At two-thirds of hospitals, less than a quarter of patients have activated their portal. Despite our constantly-connected world, many patients still don't use or see the value in the patient portal.

Improving the Use of Patient Portals

Nearly all healthcare facilities have a portal system in place, and many practitioners are trying to encourage their patients to use the technology. It’s important for healthcare providers to understand their patients’ barriers to adoption and how to best address and counter them.

Why do older patients use patient portals?

Just because your patients are older does not mean they are incapable of using the patient portal technology. The study published in the Annals of Family Medicine found that older patients and patients with chronic conditions were more likely to create a patient portal account, and many of these elderly patients often experience chronic conditions. The patient portal has become a fantastic tool for managing chronic conditions. Since these patients have more appointments to schedule and more lab results to view, the portal can ease these processes and keep them well-informed on their health. While they may take more time to learn the technology, elderly patients are often some of your most engaged patients, so continue to encourage portal use among these older patients as well as your younger demographic.

How to speed up a patient's visit to the office?

To speed up a patient’s visit to the office, let them know of any questionnaires or medical history forms they can fill out on the portal ahead of time. When a patient checks out, be sure to remind them that bills are payable through the portal as well.

What is incentive in healthcare?

An incentive can motivate patients to sign up for and engage with the portal. To encourage use, patients who sign up for the portal within a certain time frame could be entered in a drawing to win a prize or a small discount on a bill for the first one they pay through the portal. If more patients make use of the portal to schedule appointments, ...

Is it important to get patients to sign up for portal?

It is not as simple as getting your patients signed up with portal accounts. It is important that you also get them to engage in the content you are sharing with them before ...

What can providers do?

Influence. Providers and care teams have one of the most important roles in promoting portal adoption. Facilities where providers inform and encourage patients to use the portal have a much higher engagement rate than those who do not.

Add value by activating features that meet patient needs

You can assess which portal features have the most value by going straight to the source: your patients. Ask them about the features they want or find useful, and tailor your portal to meet their needs.

Integrate patient-generated health data

Technology has changed how patients monitor their own health. One in five people use technology to track their health from fitness monitors to home medical devices. Using patient-generated health data has big advantages. Studies show it:

External marketing tips

Make the message to enroll and use the portal highly visible in your practice by:

The importance of internal buy-in

Internal buy-in is just as important as your external marketing strategies. Once your staff is sold on the benefits of the portal, they will enthusiastically encourage patients to sign up. Some tips to facilitate staff buy-in include:

1. The portal needs to be easy to use

This sounds obvious, but we encountered plenty of patients who had difficulty using the system their doctors provided.

2. You need to explain the portal to patients

Even if the portal is easy to use, you can’t just tell patients it exists and expect them to use it.

3. Patients need to see it as secure

With stories about health data breaches becoming commonplace, assuring your patients that their data is secure will make them more likely to trust and use a patient portal.

4. Patients with chronic conditions are more likely to use a patient portal

Fully 40% of the patients we spoke to who used a patient portal regularly do so because of a chronic medical condition. For these patients, portals are a huge timesaver as they can replace costly visits, or lengthy games of phone tag.

5. You need to use it, too

Making sure a patient portal gets used is a two-way street. Because doctors and medical practices are responsible for uploading lab results, updating the software, and responding to patients, their engagement (or lack thereof) can have a direct effect on how good an experience patients have.

Your experience?

Has your practice implemented a patient portal? What have you done to raise your patient portal engagement?

How to encourage patients to send your office a secure message from their patient portal?

Once they sign up, enter them into a drawing for a prize or gift card. Display a fishbowl with a poster or the prize with the information where patients will see it in your waiting room.

How to remind patients to make appointments?

Remind patients they can make appointments online through their patient portal when they call for an appointment. Remind patients to view their medical history, eye exam results, and other clinical summaries online before they leave the office.

Why is patient portal important?

Patient portals can be great tools for engaging your patients, and can even help save you time when patients use secure messaging. Still, getting your practice’s patient portal set-up and actually getting patients to use it are two entirely different challenges.

Can you schedule an appointment online?

If a patient calls in to schedule an appointment, have the receptionist explain that next time they can schedule an appointment online, and even receive appointment reminders by email. When patients are checking out, make sure staff say they’ll be able to pay their bills online.

Is patient portal a project?

Adopting a patient portal is a huge project, and it’s likely to need some tweaking and updating after your first launch. If you add a new feature (like, say appointment scheduling) or update the layout to make it more user-friendly, make sure you advertise these changes to your patients. A patient who initially logged on and was frustrated by bugs or a difficult layout might be encouraged by news of an updated design.

What is patient portal?

Your patient portal can do a lot of things, but chances are that most of your patients do not care about all of the portal’s features. Instead of overwhelming patients with information, tell them about the features that they are most likely to use. This includes things that make it easier for patients to manage their health and to perform otherwise time-consuming tasks online – for example, features that give them the ability to:

Why is patient engagement important?

Patient engagement is a necessary element for the achievement of a better quality of care and it is a critical component of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) initiative to focus on the quality of care. CMS programs like the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, MACRA, are fundamentally changing the reimbursement matrix for healthcare in the United States by shifting the focus from fee for service to reimbursement for quality. Thus, determining the right patient engagement solution has become increasingly important for healthcare organizations.

What is the role of a physician in patient engagement?

A recent survey by the New England Journal of Medicine Insights Council, found that physician buy-in is essential to the adoption of patient engagement technology. Patients are much more likely to use a new technology if their physician wants them to use it. It is important to note that the physician’s role does not end after suggesting a new patient engagement technology, many patients will require reinforcement of the idea. For example, once patients are using a patient portal, their physician should mention the portal at each visit and specifically refer to a feature in which the patient might find value.

How does a patient care coordinator help a patient?

If your healthcare organization uses patient care coordinators to promote health awareness and help patients reach their care goals , you know how integral these individuals are to successful patient engagement technology implementation. Care Coordinators work with the physician and patient to develop a care plan, they communicate the provider’s plan to the patient, and they continually assess the patient’s needs. They also play a vital role in adoption of patient engagement technology by by promoting patient portal features that open lines of communication and streamline care plan management.

The Portal Needs to Be Easy to Use

You Need to Explain The Portal to Patients

Patients Need to See It as Secure

Patients with Chronic Conditions Are More Likely to Use A Patient Portal

• Fully 40% of the patients we spoke to who used a patient portal regularly do so because of a chronic medical condition. For these patients, portals are a huge timesaver as they can replace costly visits, or lengthy games of phone tag. For Bill Balderaz, President of a healthcare companyhimself, his doctor’s patient portal has done wonders, “I have ...

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You Need to Use It, Too

Your Experience?