When was the last time you purchased an airline ticket by calling a carrier or paid a monthly bill with a paper check? In the past two decades, companies from the nation’s largest industries—financial, retail, travel and real estate—have invested significantly in online technology to connect with their customers and conduct transactions.
Healthcare has only just begun the journey in boosting its digital communication and transactions with patients. Part of the reluctance has been concern about the disruption to staff and provider workflows, perceived lack of interest by patients, absence of incentives from payers and overall security concern.
Patient and payer demands, however, are changing. Results from a recent survey of practices using our patient portal show a 300 percent increase in the number of secure online messages between providers or staff and patients in just the past year. With smartphone adoption reaching 68 percent of U.S. consumers, according to the Nielsen Company, that demand for digital communication will likely increase.
This demand is being heard by consumer-focused technology vendors too. In the last month, multiple companies have announced new solutions that aim to consolidate patient-generated data and streamline the exchange of information between patients and providers. It’s clear that stakeholders in healthcare and consumer electronics are projecting that patients will more often want to communicate and share personal health information that they have captured with their providers. The key to the success of any of these, or future, solutions will be to ensure that providers are given data in a way that does not impact their current workflow significantly, seamlessly integrates with their current technology platforms and does not overburden their staff.
By Michael Raymer and Steve Emery, Medfusion
When was the last time you purchased an airline ticket by calling a carrier or paid a monthly bill with a paper check? In the past two decades, companies from the nation’s largest industries—financial, retail, travel and real estate—have invested significantly in online technology to connect with their customers and conduct transactions.
Healthcare has only just begun the journey in boosting its digital communication and transactions with patients. Part of the reluctance has been concern about the disruption to staff and provider workflows, perceived lack of interest by patients, absence of incentives from payers and overall security concern.
Patient and payer demands, however, are changing. Results from a recent survey of practices using our patient portal show a 300 percent increase in the number of secure online messages between providers or staff and patients in just the past year. With smartphone adoption reaching 68 percent of U.S. consumers, according to the Nielsen Company, that demand for digital communication will likely increase.
This demand is being heard by consumer-focused technology vendors too. In the last month, multiple companies have announced new solutions that aim to consolidate patient-generated data and streamline the exchange of information between patients and providers. It’s clear that stakeholders in healthcare and consumer electronics are projecting that patients will more often want to communicate and share personal health information that they have captured with their providers. The key to the success of any of these, or future, solutions will be to ensure that providers are given data in a way that does not impact their current workflow significantly, seamlessly integrates with their current technology platforms and does not overburden their staff.
Payers, too, are advocating more digital communication between providers and patients. Stage 2 of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Meaningful Use of electronic health records (EHRs) program requires eligible professionals and hospitals to communicate and exchange information online with patients in order to earn the program’s financial incentive.
Practices and hospitals that are still delaying the transition to digital communication and transactions with patients should not wait any longer. If done incrementally, introducing digital communication can be a smooth process and easily integrated into workflows. In a short time, organizations will notice significantly fewer disruptive and time-consuming phone calls and more efficient online exchanges that improve productivity and promote continuity of care.
Patient demands and demographics influencing trend
In addition to the expansion of high-speed Internet access, the increase of high-deductible health plans and co-pays are driving patient demand for digital communication with their providers. To avoid an expensive office visit or having to take time off work, patients are increasingly turning to online tools to ask their provider a simple health-related question, inquire about a lab result or request a prescription renewal.
This communication may not only pertain the patients themselves, either. In recent times, more adults have assumed caretaker roles for their elderly parents, while they still monitor the care of their children and themselves. Being able to contact these family members’ providers online, review the results of a recent laboratory test, notes from their physicians, or date and time for their next appointment saves money and significant time for these caretakers. With easy online access to this information and provider-messaging capabilities, the likelihood that these patients will adhere to their treatment plan also increases.
Incremental transition
For organizations that have limited or no digital communication with patients in place today, they could begin the transition by implementing a patient portal that would assist administrative staff with traditionally phone-based duties such as appointment scheduling, gathering health plan information, prescription renewal requests and collecting outstanding patient balances.
Administrators and front-office staff will also appreciate that a portal can allow them to establish alerts to be emailed to patients or sent as a text to their mobile devices. Automated email reminders allow staff to alert patients about a scheduled or past due appointment, to refill a prescribed medication, pay an outstanding balance or to complete other tasks. All of these reminders can be programmed into the portal and performed, alleviating staff from leaving phone messages or creating and mailing letters that may not be seen by the recipient.
Once providers and their patients are accustomed to an administrative level of digital communication, the organization can increase the functionality of the portal to include more clinical tasks such as completing pre-visit paperwork online, sharing lab results, and even exchanging secure messages with providers or conducting online visits. While providers will spend more time on their computer, these productive tasks will engage patients directly at home or on their mobile device as opposed to the more passive activity of mailing of a letter or leaving a phone message.
Preparing for the tsunami of patient data
Ideally, all providers will embrace an organization’s steady increase of digital communication because data demands and information supplied by the patient are only expected to increase. In the coming years, durable biometric sensors located on wearable monitoring devices will automatically report patients’ blood glucose levels, blood pressure and heart rate to providers, who must be able to efficiently collect and manage those data so that they can monitor progress and detect when a potential adverse event is possible.
Selecting a patient portal that is agnostic to the EHR system, agnostic to the mobile device and agnostic to the wearable monitor will best position organizations to maximize their integration with other systems as well as the data capture from patients. Likewise, there will need to be a workflow established leveraging clinical support staff to monitor this influx so that patient-generated data does not overrun the inbox of the physician or EHR repository.
By getting started now with a patient portal integrated with other information technology systems, organizations can help prepare their providers and staff for the impending tsunami of data from patients. This wave of highly specific, real-time data, however, is not something to be feared. Rather, this information exchange should be embraced as it will help providers better manage populations and individual patients even when they are outside the walls of the care venue.
Michael Raymer is vice president of solutions management and Steve Emery is director of product management for Medfusion.
