what are some challenges of using patient portal programs in healthcare

Other challenges to portal use include access, navigation, privacy concerns, and multiple portals. Access to patient portals requires using a computer, tablet, or smartphone. Not all patients have these devices, or they may not be comfortable using them.

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Why don’t more patients use patient portals?

Feb 17, 2016 · The most frequently reported downside to patient portals is the difficulty providers often face in generating patient buy-in. Although providers are generally aware of the health perks of using a patient portal, patients are seldom as excited about the portal as they are.

What are the barriers to patient portal implementation?

Feb 26, 2018 · Patients don’t care about meaningful use and the fact that their provider will lose money if they don’t create an account and actually use …

How can providers improve patient engagement with patient portals?

May 15, 2018 · Burying lab results or not offering access to clinician notes will likely keep patients from seeing the utility of the portal. Even if providers offer this health data, making it difficult for patients to navigate to it will reduce the utility …

What are the most common usability issues with hospital portals?

Mar 21, 2019 · Logging into a portal on a hospital website that looks like a 2005 creation (and probably was), and displays information and events that aren’t current does not inspire confidence in consumers. Reliability and security are key concerns today, especially with patients who aren’t comfortable with computers.

What are the challenges of patient portals?

Other disadvantages of patient portals include alienation and health disparities. Alienation between patient and provider occurs for those who don't access these tools. Sometimes, this is due to health disparities if a person doesn't have a method for using them.Nov 11, 2021

What are the disadvantages of using a patient portal?

The most frequently reported downside to patient portals is the difficulty providers often face in generating patient buy-in. Although providers are generally aware of the health perks of using a patient portal, patients are seldom as excited about the portal as they are.Feb 17, 2016

What are the benefits and challenges of implementing a patient portal?

Patient portals satisfy meaningful use standards Improve quality, safety, efficiency, and reduce health disparities. Increase patient engagement. Improve care coordination. Expand population and public health.Jul 15, 2019

What is the most common barrier to the use of the patient portal?

Conclusions: The most common barriers to patient portal adoption are preference for in-person communication, not having a need for the patient portal, and feeling uncomfortable with computers, which are barriers that are modifiable and can be intervened upon.Sep 17, 2020

What are the pros and cons of being an e patient?

4 Pros and Cons of Digital Patient Health Data AccessPro: Patients enjoy digital data access.Con: Complicated health info causes concern for patients, docs.Pro: Patients can review info for medical errors.Con: Clinician notes raise patient-provider relationship concerns.Aug 10, 2017

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.

What are challenges for patients that do not have access to all of the PHRs?

Between underutilization of technology, lack of patient education, and inadequate health IT interoperability, patients and providers are struggling to ensure robust patient health data access.Underutilized patient portals.Ambiguous security protocols.Limited health data interoperability.Aug 11, 2016

What are the benefits of using a patient portal?

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

Do patient portals improve healthcare?

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.

Why do hospitals have patient portals?

Most healthcare organizations have implemented some form of a patient portal to meet meaningful use requirements mandated by the federal government. Providers hope that their EHR patient portal will help improve communication with patients, enabling them to intervene before a small medical problem turns into a hospital re-admission, ...

Why do patients not care about meaningful use?

Patients don’t care about meaningful use and the fact that their provider will lose money if they don’t create an account and actually use the portal. Patient portals are notoriously obsolete and difficult to navigate, and patients often struggle to interpret medical information, such as test results.

How to improve patient satisfaction and loyalty?

To achieve better outcomes and improve patient satisfaction and loyalty, providers must use technology that will facilitate continuous dialogue with patients utilizing personalized content and an empathetic tone. That two-way interaction will activate patients to be more participatory and empowered in their care, ...

Is finding scientific papers expensive?

For researchers who aren’t affiliated with an academic library, finding scientific papers can be time-consuming and expensive —and organizing and sharing them with co-workers can be even harder. A new tool by DeepDyve looks to help researchers address this gap.

Is Mapquest still available?

While it still exists — it was the No. 2 mapping service in the U.S. as of 2015 — it’s been largely outmoded by Google Maps, Apple Maps, and other smartphone-based GPS services that have rendered pre-printed driving directions obsolete. MapQuest certainly helped pave the way for today’s GPS mapping services.

What are the benefits of patient portal?

Patient portal benefits are numerous – they provide patients access to their health data, allow patients to securely message their providers, and in many cases allow patients to complete administrative tasks such as scheduling appointments and paying bills. Providers have recognized those benefits and nearly universally offer access to ...

Why is patient portal adoption at 90 percent?

Despite strong clinician support, patient portal adoption still hovers at 90 percent because patients face some barriers to meaningfully using the tool. Source: Thinkstock.

How can providers promote patient adoption?

Providers can also promote patient adoption by enrolling patients in the clinic, explaining the key functions that can benefit patients in their healthcare management, and explaining how the tool will improve their patient-provider relationships.

What is NLP in healthcare?

NLP helps to translate certain clinical terms in the patient portal to make them more understandable for patients. Providers must also do their jobs to improve patient health literacy. This means using patient health literacy tests and offering patient education where applicable.

Why is patient health literacy important?

Patient health literacy is an integral key to improving patient portal adoption. Just as patients want to see the features they value in way that is navigable, they also want to understand that information. If a patient has low health literacy, they are unlikely to find patient portal data useful.

Can a patient have a low health literacy?

If a patient has low health literacy, they are unlikely to find patient portal data useful. Some health IT developers have begun to leverage natural language processing (NLP) to make patient portal information more accessible for patients with lower health literacy. On average, most patients have poor health literacy.

Is patient portal uptake limited?

However, patient portal uptake is still limited, despite provider enthusiasm and the tool’s potential benefits. A 2017 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report noted that while nearly 90 percent of providers offer access to the patient portal, less than one-third of patients have integrated the tool into their daily lives.

Why are portals so complicated?

A big issue for many users is that portals are simply too complicated for at least two opposite kinds of users: those who have low computer literacy, and those who are so computer savvy that they expect the simplicity of an Uber or Instagram app to get a test result or appointment with a click or two.

How many benefits do portals provide?

Similarly, healthcare providers can achieve at least three big benefits from patients’ portal-usage: greater efficiencies, cost-savings and improved health outcomes — again, only if patients use their portals. But with only 20% of patients regularly relying on portals, many benefits have been unattainable.

Can rapid access replace patient rights?

Rapid access cannot replace patients’ rights to understand. Even if a test result isn’t recognizably negative, a portal presentation of an uninterpreted report can be painful to patients and certainly unproductive.

Is the portal concept slow?

Acceptance of the portal concept continues to be slow, especially within physicians’ offices and small to middle size hospitals. Though these providers implemented portals via their Meaningful Use / MIPS incentives, portals are often not treated as a central communications tool. Patient engagement? Yes…a laudable objective for policymakers — but many physicians already lament the deep cuts in their daily patient schedule that have been created by complex EHR-related obligations. The added work of portal interaction has been the opposite of a pot-sweetener, despite touted financial benefits.

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.

Why are portals important?

Yet, if we can get patients to use them, portals have a lot of potential benefits. Allowing patients to access their records can make them more informed. Asynchronous communication can be more efficient.

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 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.”

Who wrote Patient Portals and Health Apps: Pitfalls, Promises, and What One Might Learn from the

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.

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 HealthKit app?

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).

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, ...

What data can be recorded on a mobile app?

Mobile apps have the capability to record several types of data, such as activity level, nutrition, and sleep, as well as data related to a consumer's condition or disease, such as diabetes or asthma.

What happens when patients cannot communicate in real time?

When patients cannot communicate in real time, providers can miss opportunities to identify nonadherence. Thus, there is heavy focus on designing portals and apps similar to MyMeds, which incorporates bidirectional communication between providers and patients.

What is mobile health?

Mobile health (mHealth) is a means of providing health services or information via portals or applications (apps) on wireless devices, such as smartphones or tablets. Patient portals are secure websites that help patients access their health information at their convenience. Many patient portals are mobile enabled via a web-based platform ...

What is mHealth communication?

Communication generally takes the form of secure messaging such as live chat or e-mail among patients and providers , including primary care and specialist physicians, pharmacists, and many others.

What is mHealth app?

mHealth apps will offer an alternative and an additional method of communication. Specialty pharmacies will cater to the patient’s preferred communication style while also being innovative in clinical management of patient care.

Is a patient portal a form of mHealth?

Many patient portals are mobile enabled via a web-based platform and are therefore considered a form of mHealth. Patient-focused mHealth apps—software or programs stored directly on the mobile device—can provide an opportunity for patient-initiated health or disease management.