The following is a guest article by Liza Dzhezhora, Healthcare IT Analyst at Itransition.
For years, patient portals have been considered the most efficient tool for patient engagement. According to the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) Stat poll, by 2018 patient portals were employed by about 90% of the surveyed providers.
However, this titanic effort in patient portal development alone seems to be insufficient for portal adoption: the same poll reports that barely 30% of patients use these solutions, year after year. So are portals a thing of the past or is it still possible to revive them? We’ll look into the matter.
What’s wrong with patient portals?
In fact, the wave of patient portal deployment wasn’t caused by patients’ interest. In fact, it was
healthcare providers’ initiative or, should we say, their need to comply with Meaningful Use
Stage 2 requirements. This federal regulatory document called for sharing EHR data with
patients to improve their engagement and independent health management. Patient portals
have to be made a key tool enabling patient onboarding, with providers who managed to enroll
their patients receiving a monetary incentive.
However, in the majority of cases, patient centricity behind portal development was only
nominal: portals often had cumbersome and confusing interfaces. What’s more, quite often
patients had no idea the facility offered a portal at all, let alone used the tool.
So is it the end of portals? It is unless providers find common ground with their patients in this
regard.
In search of common ground
Patient portals do have a serious advantage that falls within patients’ interests. It’s patient education. As thousands of people look up health information online, this search can point to unverified results and thus lead to dire health consequences in case users proceed with self-diagnosing and self-medicating. This is where providers may step in by offering patient education opportunities within their portals.
To make it work for patients, though, some upgrades might be required to raise use rates.
Portal upgrades
First of all, a patient portal should be clear and easy to navigate. It would be helpful to create a simple user guide explaining to patients how to interact with the portal. Besides, it’s also reasonable to make portals mobile-friendly. A 2019 study of the new approaches to granting EHR access in 12 US healthcare systems revealed that patients are more likely to take their health under control when they have access to the EHR via their smartphones. So making a portal mobile-friendly may spark its adoption, too.
Onboarding ideas
The next step is to encourage patients to use the portal more actively. Mind that it’s not only about traditional promotion measures—leaflets, announcements on the website, posts on social media, and such. Those measures are valid and needed, but providers may go further by allowing patients to get started with the portal without registration.
This is what Novant Health, a US South-East healthcare network, did. The team offered potential users to book appointments and consult educational materials without registration. This smart strategy brought quite a result: in six years, the team managed to expand the portal user base from zero to 815K people, with an annual increment of 135K new users.
However, there’s the rub here. While patients with chronic conditions or those recovering from a surgery will certainly be interested in patient education, others might be unlikely to get attracted with this feature. In this regard, targeting is key. Providers may want to position the portal differently for different segments of the population, putting the most popular feature forward for portal promotion.
Having a say
Here comes another problem—focused on their work, clinicians aren’t always aware of the digital channels their organization offers. To bridge this gap, the latter’s management need to spread the word about the portal, its top features, and basic use scenarios among their employees. It’s vital to point out that clinicians need to keep the ball rolling, that is, to inform key users—the patients—about the solution and its usefulness. Of course, it doesn’t mean doctors should invest many hours in advertising this engagement tool. It’s enough to mention the solution during an appointment or just via a patient’s preferred communication channel.
Will this strategy work for improving portal adoption? It is likely to pay off. As we know, the majority of patients trust their assigned clinicians and are likely to follow their recommendations regarding any health-related matter, including health management.
Emphasizing mutual value
Patient portals are useful not only for patients. In fact, clinicians may also benefit from them when it comes to patients’ medical data, especially clinical notes and EHRs. How so?
Well, doctors occasionally make mistakes when filling in clinical data on each patient. This is a logical result of their immense workload and fatigue. Luckily, patients may help doctors out: consulting their clinical notes and EHRs via the portal, patients may spot typos and mistakes that may cause misinterpretation and incorrect care decisions if left unattended. The good news is that the majority of patients can fix these mistakes in their records efficiently.
What’s more, letting patients consult their clinical notes on the portal may improve not only EHR quality but also patient-clinician relationships. If healthcare professionals manage to explain to patients that by using the portal they can help improve their health data quality, they will get yet another reason to adopt it.
Summing up
Portals are far from being outdated. But the problem is that, in many cases, they were created just to tick a box, without a focus on patients’ actual needs. Luckily, it’s possible to amend the situation.
First of all, portals should be updated to become truly user-friendly and intuitive. Secondly, providers should educate clinical staff and motivate them to become kind of ambassadors spreading the word about the portal among its key users—patients. And finally, providers should prove to patients that their active health management is critical to care quality. This insight may motivate patients to take an active part in their health management via the portal.
About Liza Dzhezhora
Liza Dzhezhora is a Healthcare IT Analyst at Itransition, a custom software development company headquartered in Denver, CO. She looks into the ways IT technologies can streamline healthcare processes and explores how medical IoT, AI, robotics, and healthcare analytics help solve industry challenges.
