what is the pro and cons to patient health care portal

What are the pros and cons of improving patient access?

Nov 11, 2021 · Below are some of the pros and cons of patient portals: Pros Fast communication Portals provide physicians with a fast and easy way to communicate with chronically ill patients. They are a place to get complete and more accurate patient information. Patient engagement

What are the downsides of a patient portal?

Feb 15, 2020 · Patient Portals are Isolated There’s really only one major con as it pertains to clinical efficiency and saving time for your staff. It’s that patient portals are not connected. Because of the increase in demand for Health IT technology is increasing rapidly, there are many portal solutions that have no communication with one another.

Could a patient portal help solve the healthcare crisis?

Feb 17, 2016 · Pro: More complete and accurate patient information. Patient portals, by offering a patient a view of their health information and the ability to communicate with their physician, create opportunities to obtain more complete and accurate patient information.

What are the risks of increasing patient access to information?

Despite the pros, patient health portals also have their cons: raising concerns regarding healthcare data security (Stewart et al., 2020) . The fact that patient portals are a health IT edge that allows patients to access their data raises concerns of how well patient information is protected for security concerns.

What are the disadvantages of using a patient portal?

Even though they should improve communication, there are also disadvantages to patient portals....Table of ContentsGetting Patients to Opt-In.Security Concerns.User Confusion.Alienation and Health Disparities.Extra Work for the Provider.Conclusion.Nov 11, 2021

What are the advantages of 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

Is patient portal safe?

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.

Can you think of any potential disadvantages of patients using the patient portal system within the EHR justify your answer?

One con to keep in mind with patient portals is that some patients may not have much experience with computers, preventing them from getting the most out of it. Another drawback is the potential for data breaches, so you'll need to work with a vendor that provides robust, secure EHR software.May 23, 2017

What are the benefits and challenges of using patient portals?

What are the benefits of patient portals?Patient portals are efficient. ... Patient portals improve communication. ... They store health information in one place. ... Patient portals satisfy meaningful use standards. ... They improve data accuracy. ... Patient portals make refilling prescriptions easy. ... They're available whenever you need them.More items...•Jul 15, 2019

How can the patient portal affect patient satisfaction?

Our model shows that patient portal use can influence patient satisfaction through the mediating effects of gratification, health self-awareness, and health perception. ... Therefore, by promoting effective patient portal use and fostering patient perceptions, health care organizations can improve patient satisfaction.

Can patient portals be hacked?

Health outcomes improve. Unfortunately, what makes your patient portal valuable for patients is exactly what makes it attractive to cybercriminals. It's a one-stop shop for entire health records, and identity thieves can make a fast buck from stealing this data and selling it on.

What percentage of patients use patient portals?

FINDINGS. Nearly 40 percent of individuals nationwide accessed a patient portal in 2020 – this represents a 13 percentage point increase since 2014.Sep 21, 2021

Are patient portals effective?

Patient portal interventions were overall effective in improving a few psychological outcomes, medication adherence, and preventive service use. There was insufficient evidence to support the use of patient portals to improve clinical outcomes.

What are the pros and cons of patients having access to their entire medical record?

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 are the disadvantages of personal health records?

Are there drawbacks to PHRs? Building a complete health record takes some time. You have to collect and enter all your health information. Only a minority of doctors, hospitals, pharmacies and insurance companies can send information electronically to a PHR that isn't part of a patient portal.

What disadvantages with regard to confidentiality are associated with the EMR?

There are also several disadvantages of electronic medical records, such as: Potential Privacy and Security Issues: As with just about every computer network these days, EHR systems are vulnerable to hacking, which means sensitive patient data could fall into the wrong hands.May 23, 2018

What are the benefits of patient portals?

One of the clearest benefits to a patient portal is the added ability for communication between patients and providers, and these benefits are felt strongest with regard to chronically ill patients.

What is portal email?

The portal is just a secure e-mail system that we can use to communicate. You can send me a message and it goes right into your chart, so I have all of your information at hand when I read it and respond. If you use it and don’t like it, you don’t have to continue to use it. Just let us know.

Why are reminders important?

Reminders from providers, and the capability for patients to discuss issues with their physicians, help increase patient engagement and therefore play a role in boosting the patient’s overall health.

Is a patient portal good?

Although this can be viewed as a good thing because patients do have the right to see their own health data, it also opens doors for security concerns. A patient portal may be just one more place for a potential hacker or healthcare data thief to access a patient’s data, leaving that patient liable to identity theft.

What is patient health data access?

August 10, 2017 - Patient health data access is a generally accepted patient engagement strategy that helps to empower patients through improved health literacy and integration into the care team.

Why is access to medical records important?

Patient access to health data and medical records is an important tactic for patient safety. Patients who view their medical records can serve as a second set of eyes to ensure that medical histories and other information are accurate. For example, patients can review medication notes and flag a dosage error.

Why do doctors use notes?

Doctors may use their notes as an opportunity to make an observation about non-compliance, which may not be received positive ly by patients later reviewing the notes.

Why is improving patient access important?

It is likely that by having more knowledge and control of their healthcare, your patients will feel more satisfied with the care that you provide to them.

What does patient access mean?

In this article, patient access means how patients can access information or data about their healthcare. Therefore, an increase in patient access will help patients feel more in control of their healthcare experience and its outcome. Today patients are engaging with their healthcare more so than ever before.

How to protect against hackers?

Here are five tips for protecting your practice against criminal computer hackers: 1 Educate your staff on how to use the software properly and how people hack into systems. Your staff needs to be aware of where the weak spots are. 2 Keep your software up-to-date so that it’s less at risk of being hacked. 3 Change your password frequently. This one can be annoying, but as with your personal accounts, don’t use the same password for all of your accounts. 4 Limit access to the software. When there are too many people logging in and out, this increases your risk of being hacked. 5 Have a plan in place so that if you are hacked, you know what to do next. For example, you’ll have to notify your patients that their information was hacked. They’re likely going to be very upset, which can be a tedious and messy fix on many levels.

What is the worst thing you can do?

The worst thing you can do is to ignore negative feedback. You definitely want to address it and quickly. The longer you wait to respond, the more time it leaves for other patients to chime in or for rumors to start. Poorly managed referrals can cost your healthcare practice. Don’t respond aggressively.

Is knowledge good or bad?

Yet, like everything else in life, more knowledge can be a good or a bad thing. There are definitely pros and cons to consider when it comes to improving patient access. Below is an outline of three pros and cons for you to think about when taking steps to improve patient access in your practice.

Why are patient portals important?

A major pro of patient portals is that they improve patient engagement. Engaged patients are more likely to stay loyal to a practice as compared to other organizations that don’t make much of an effort to connect.

What is an EHR in medical practice?

An EHR is a database of all the records for your patients. It’s much more efficient than an antiquated, paper-based method for organizing charts in your practice.

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, ...

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.

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).