Patient portals have a future as a patient engagement tool if clinicians are on board and encourage their use

I wrote my first patient portal site, built into my first EMR software, back in 1998. At that time I mistakenly thought that portals would take off and patients would embrace them. What I quickly learned was that patient portals aren’t really portals in the sense of Yahoo! or Google but enterprise software’s customer-facing front-ends. The enterprise software in this case is of course an EHR and the customers are the patients. If patients are the consumers then their expectations are that they can conduct “business” with the practice through the portal. This means messaging, getting questions answers, scheduling appointments, reviewing all records, etc. are minimal value propositions for a patient portal. However, even though portals are terrific opportunities for patient engagement, most portals’ technology architecture do not provide significant enough value for patients. I reached out to Cameron Graham, Editorial Coordinator at TechnologyAdvice, about what he’s seeing in the marketplace when it comes to portals. Cameron oversees market research for healthcare IT, business intelligence, and other emerging technologies and here’s what he had to say about how vendors and clinicians can encourage patients to use their respective portals: Patient portals have the potential to simplify practice operations and reduce physician costs, but only if patients adopt and use them. We surveyed 430 people who had recently visited their primary car...
Source: The Healthcare IT Guy - Category: Technology Consultants Authors: Tags: Meaningful Use Patient Self-Management Usability patient physician portals patient portals Source Type: blogs