Patient Portal changing the gears in Patient Engagement

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:

1. If a patient schedules an appointment online instead of calling or visiting the hospital, the hospital does not need to employ  a person  just to book
2. The doctor can directly upload the lab results or similar documents into the portal, making it easily available for the patient to access.
3. The doctor can understand the reason behind the patient’s visit.
4. Thepatient can intimate in advance about any specific needs like wheelchair, or other such assistance needed while  visiting hospital.
5. The patient will be notified of the appointment confirmation in the patient portal.
6. For easy navigation, the hospital can provide a route map to the patient.
7. The hospital layout can be provided to the patient.
8. The patient will have the facility of checking in online.
9. The patient can be notified of the availability of paid parking space.
10. The patient can avail the facility of paying any outstanding amount online.

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:

1. Booking an appointment online rather than calling the hospital. Providing maximum details such as  insurance coverage, special needs etc. to hospitals while booking the appointment.
2. Receiving notifications for your medication, appointment alerts, etc.
3. Patient educational material available pertaining to patient’s ailment
4. Direct access to doctor via sage communication channel
5. Receiving diagnostic results directly in your portal.
6. Paying bills
7. Automatically calculating copays or out-of-pocket expenses
8. On the day of the appointment, patient receiving a notification or email for assistance in booking  a cab and

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.

1. Patient-specific education material on the patient portal
2. Options to track patient’s health
3. Virtual coaching to patient
4. Multi-lingual capability in patient portal
5. Patient -generated data submission to registries
6. Integration with HIE, commercial labs, radiology

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:

1. Having multiple proxy accounts
2. Security associated with transmission of data and leakage of login credentials
3. Educating patient about portal
4. Interoperability

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:

• Deep technology depth combined with MU experience
• Healthcare Functional consultants for adding a number of features to the existing portal as required in Meaningful Use
• Customized Patient Portal Development Solutions

Reach out to us at Nitor Infotech to learn more about how we can help you enhance patient experience.