Patient Portals as it Relates to Engagement
By Zach Watson
Twitter: @Technology_Adv
Having been forecast for some time now, the hour of the patient portal seems to have arrived for US healthcare. In fact, according to a 2012 survey, 57 percent of providers already have a patient portal in place, although the survey sample size was somewhat small.
A number of market factors have converged to push these applications to the top of providers’ priority lists. Some have been artificially spurred by Meaningful Use, while others appear as natural evolutions of patient expectations.
Although patient engagement could be listed as one of a laundry list of terms making its way to the top of the healthcare lexicon, the concept behind the words isn’t entirely manufactured from the aforementioned federal regulations.
As it relates to patient portals, engagement really means access. Patients are accustomed to quickly and easily accessing personal information in other aspects of their lives without substantial barriers. Now they expect their health information to be available in the same fashion. Studies support this growing expectation: 41 percent of patients confirmed they would consider switching providers – yes, abandon relationships that span years – to gain more complete access to their health information.
It seems fewer and fewer patients are willing to tolerate providers who don’t offer an easy for them to access to their desired information. It’s been happening in other industries for years, and now patients are beginning to expect the same services from their healthcare providers.
Though not specifically tied to the shift in patient’s expectation of access, federal Meaningful Use laws are certainly relevant. To attest for Stage 2, providers must have 5 percent of their patients view, download, or transmit health information as well as implement reminders for follow-up appointments and identify relevant educational material for more than 10 percent of patients with two or more office visits in the preceding two years.
Providers often argue that the goals of Meaningful Use lean too sharply toward completing the checklist than actually improving patient care, but in the instance of patient portals the two seem aligned. Patients want greater access to their health information, and if providers want to receive federal subsidies for implementing new technology, they are required to grant that request.
Loyalty Above All Else?
Now that adopting a patient portal has moved from the realm of innovation and into the reality of necessity, the criteria with which providers are choosing specific products becomes an even more compelling topic to scrutinize.
Given the middling levels of satisfaction it seems most providers feel towards their electronic health record systems, usability, or the intuitiveness of the technology for the user, would have been a good bet as the top consideration for providers when choosing a patient portal.
The reality, however, is far different.
Based on the results of a recent KLAS survey, providers most often choose portals that feature as a model of their current EHR system. The report highlighted that provides were willing to overlook interoperability if they could implement a functioning portal through their current EHR vendor.
These findings underscore a trend in provider’s healthcare IT buying habits: the desire to limit and simplify vendor relationships.
While providers would likely prefer intuitive technology, the task of managing multiple vendor relationships seems to be a great enough deterrent that physicians and hospitals would rather opt for one healthcare system that manages everything.
Having a system that integrates everything from practice management to patient portals seems to be the direction in which healthcare IT is headed.
Popular Integrated Portals
Tethered portals simply refer to EHR portals that are provided by the same vendor as an EHR system, while untethered portals are more likely to be vendor agnostic. With a nod to the aforementioned findings that physicians prefer tethered portals, read more about three popular integrated portals.
This article was originally published on Technology Advice and is republished here with permission.