virtual desktop patient portal articles

Are patients and physicians ready for online portals in healthcare?

Apr 01, 2014 · To date, Project Safety Net and the Breast Health Portal are the only comprehensive web-based tools for virtual patient navigation in underserved populations in the local healthcare delivery system. While the portals were comprehensive and provided much-needed information to assist in patient navigation, by 2010 the original platform was ...

What are the key features of a patient portal?

Sep 01, 2017 · According to Pew Research, 7 in 10 U.S. adults say they track at least one health indicator. 7 Although the number of patients interested in accessing their test results and tracking their health parameters has increased, patient portal use nationally is variable.5, 8 For example, Athenahealth reports a 25% adoption rate across 1100 fee-for ...

How many patient portal logins does a hospital need?

VR proved to be an engaging learning tool that patients perceived as beneficial in understanding their health status. Further efforts to investigate the role of VR in education and health care should be explored. ... The Application of Virtual Reality in Patient Education Ann Vasc Surg. 2019 Aug;59:184-189. doi: 10.1016/j.avsg.2019.01.015. Epub ...

Are patient-facing IT tools patient portals or applications more effective?

Each provider (including the hospital) uses a unique patient portal linked to a unique electronic health record (EHR). That's six different portals, six logins, and six different batches of ...

How does virtual healthcare help?

Virtual healthcare means a patient sees a new doctor every time he or she seeks medical aid. Though this can depersonalize care for some, it also reduces costs for patients, as they have little to no travel costs and virtual care costs are usually lower than in-person care. Additionally, the patient’s continuous access to a secure patient portal means that he or she can share stored medical reports with a remote medical practitioner, meaning that quick, accurate care is still just as accessible. Virtual care also reduces costs for hospitals and health systems, as they can use their physicians’ time and the rooms in their hospitals for patients needing more acute or immediate care.

What is synchronous virtual care?

Synchronous virtual care reduces or eliminates travel for the clinician or patient and can be especially crucial for patients and doctors located in rural areas who may not have a healthcare facility nearby. However, in the urban areas increased transaction costs outweigh the benefits.

Is EMR a privacy issue?

Giving EMR access to technology companies that develop healthcare platforms is a topic of great debate, as privacy is a major concern. Strict privacy guidelines mean gathering medical information for a patient can be a challenge for a remote physician.

What is a patient portal?

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.”

How can information technology improve patient care?

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.

What is the use of health information technology?

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, ...

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.

Do portals talk to each other?

A big problem is that portals are not standardized and often don't talk to each other. Imagine an older patient – a computer literate 71-year-old male who sees a family physician, a dermatologist, an ophthalmologist, an orthopedist, and a urologist, and uses just one hospital.

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 factors that affect access to PPs?

Gender, education, marital status, and having a regular clinician were factors associated with access, facilitators of use, and use of PPs ( Table 2 ). Age, language proficiency, and having health insurance were also associated with PPs access and use but not race and ethnicity.

What are the factors associated with PP access and use?

Having a primary care clinician, patient’s educational attainment, and being a woman were factors associated with PP access and use, but not race/ethnicity. Once access was achieved, use of PP functionalities was generally uniform across demographic segments.