Today’s world is advancing with great speed and spontaneity. All domains and sectors are improving by providing best quality services to their targeted audience. Best quality services can only be provided to the audience if the audience is engaged. . For example, FMCG companies can provide good quality products to their consumers only if the consumers can be engaged or encouraged to buy the company’sproduct. FMCG companies therefore try to engage the consumer by advertising and marketing their goods.
The healthcare industry is no exception.
Providers within the healthcare industry engage with their targeted audience: patients.
The Best Way to Engage a Patient
The first thing that comes to mind is a patient health portal or electronic medical/health records software for boosting patient engagement in healthcare. Just imagine a highly interactive and engaging patientweb health portal that keeps your patient engaged and satisfied by the good quality of service you provide!
What is a Patient Portal?
A Patient Portal is defined as a medium of engaging patients by using a web based health portal wherein a user can manage his health-right from scheduling an appointment with a doctor to requesting the doctor to refill his prescription. This patient engagement solution/strategy, for better patient health implies the use of superior engagement technology to display electronic health records for coordinated care and an integrated patient telehealth experience.
How Can a Patient Portal be Useful to Providers?
If providers have their own medic portal, most office operations in the hospital revolving around patient engagement will reduce. Also, it will satisfy the Meaningful Use requirement for providers, thus making them eligible for incentives.
Let’s have a look at some real scenarios:
These are just a handful of the advantages of having a patient portal. If your patient portal covers most of the Meaningful Uses as defined by the US healthcare compliance, then it’s already a win-win situation for your hospital.
How Does a Patient Portal Help Patients?
Just imagine a fully customizable portal for patients.
Some of the real time scenarios in which a patient portal can be useful are:
Essential Patient Portal Features
a. Schedule an appointment
b. View Reports or results
c. View bills/Pay bills
d. Refill prescription
e. Easy access to doctor
f. Notifications or alerts
g. Ability to digitally sign HIPPA Consent
Good-to-have Features
Although not strictly necessary, these features can offer incentives to providers.
With Meaningful Use becoming mandatory for providers, it is wise to have these features in the patient health portal. These features are designed to improve the quality of service received by the patient. With MACRA/MIPS kicking in by 2016, the government will be providing incentives if these features are present in a portal.
On the other hand, the government will penalize those who do not have these features incorporated into their portal.
Let’s say if you have one of the features as providing electronic access to the patient for his record, then having your very own customizable patient portal to meet this criteria is not a bad option.
Challenges
As we are moving ahead in making patient engagement the best from the quality perspective, there are certain rules which hospitals needs to follow. CMS has made it compulsory to follow HIPPA compliance and Meaningful Use 2 says that the hospital or physician needs to have their own medic portal.
Other challenges or pointers which need to be kept in mind while implementing a patient portal are:
How You Can Use Nitor’s Expertise
Nitor has healthcare software product development DNA and specializes in IT engineering management practices-Software Product Engineering, Analytic Engineering, Business Quality Assurance (Testing) and Enterprise Mobility. Our track record boasts of creating world class software products and services with cutting edge technologies across multiple domains.
For a patient portal, Nitor can help you with:
Reach out to us at Nitor Infotech to learn more about how we can help you enhance patient experience.
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