To Portal Or Not To Portal?
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
Are portals living up to their potential?
Studies show more than 80 percent of doctors believe a portal can help with patient satisfaction, and 71 percent believe they helps with patient/physicians communication. Patients are also clamoring to jump on the portal bandwagon with two-thirds indicating they would be more loyal to physicians who provide a portal through an EHR.
But as a recent Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) study asserts, “Patient portals provide patients with the tools to better manage and understand their health status. However, widespread adoption of patient portals faces resistance from patients and providers for a number of reasons, and there is limited evidence evaluating the characteristics of patient portals that received positive remarks from patients and providers.”
On the positive side, patient portals empower patients to become active in their health, allow patients to report health readings directly to their provider, provide a forum for patients to ask questions or seek advice from healthcare providers, allow patients to print health records, allow patients to check and update health records to guarantee accuracy, and provides a convenient means of scheduling appointments.
Meanwhile, negative attributes of portals include the absence of a uniform set of standards for healthcare records, not providing access to what patients want or need, seeming intimidating to older and less tech-savvy populations, a lack of patient trust regarding accuracy and reliability, security concerns revolving around the privacy of protected personal information, and a lack of data to date revealing the positive impact of patient portals.
According to EHR Intelligence, University of Missouri Health Care CEO & COO Mitch Wasden, EdD believes the patient portal will become the means for health data integration as an aggregator of patient health information, stating, “In the future it’s about migrating it to be more of a mobile platform. In healthcare based on your age, sex, and medical condition, there are probably five or six things every year you should have done, but you’re just not tracking it. We’re taking your age, sex, and medical condition and pushing to the portal the things you need to have done this year and click here to schedule. Now we’re showing to the patient the value of integrated medical care.”
As one physician notes, “The portal is a tool. A tool works or doesn’t work based on usability and how effectively it does the job. We shouldn’t be talking about the portal, we should be talking first about the job: making clinical information easily available in a usable format to the person for whom it matters most: the patient.”
But a HIMSS Analytics study, sponsored by InterSystems, has revealed portals are not living up to patient engagement needs. “Most portals don’t really align well with the definition of patient engagement,” one leader said. “They are great for convenience, but they don’t actually help people manage chronic diseases, improve their health, or give them resources they need to move toward healthier behaviors. Most of the tools out there just don’t deliver on that promise.”
Thus, leaders are now searching for next-generation portals to offer the functionality that will enable patients to become partners in their own care. In particular, in order to fully engage patients, healthcare providers want functionality such as e-visits or e-consultations (80 percent), interoperability across multiple providers (70 percent), health evaluation and coaching (70 percent), and tele-visits (50 percent).