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Patient portals are essential for improving medical care by providing online access to health records and facilitating communication between patients and providers. However, convincing patients to use them can be challenging.

Why Patient Portals Matter

Patient portal usage can have a direct impact on patient outcomes. According to a systematic review published in JMIR Human Factors, patient portals have improved various psychobehavioral outcomes such as health knowledge, self-efficacy, decision-making, medication adherence, and preventive service use.

User Preferences

Most healthcare communication still happens over the phone, in person, or on paper. However, technology solutions are making headway. As of 2020, nearly 40% of individuals nationwide accessed a patient portal, representing a 13-percentage point increase since 2014.

However, while patients want digital-first options, many report that the functionality of available systems is lacking. These industry shortcomings highlight the importance of working with a seasoned partner who can provide user-friendly tools.

How to Effectively Implement Patient Portals

Several effective methods can be employed to encourage patients to adopt patient portals, each aiming to enhance patient engagement and ease of use. Here, we touch on the three most important steps healthcare leadership can take right now:

  1. Educate Staff and Patients: Providing education and training to clinic staff on the benefits and functionalities of the patient portal is crucial. This includes explaining key features, how-to instructions, and the overall importance of the portal.
  2. Highlight the Benefits: Inform patients about the advantages of using a patient portal. These benefits include faster access to lab and imaging results, easier online scheduling appointments, online bill payments, and secure messaging with healthcare providers.
  3. Use Marketing: Implementing digital marketing strategies, such as email campaigns and website sign-up forms, can help increase portal adoption among existing patients. Additionally, placing simple signs in the office that promote patient portal enrollment can capture patients' attention and encourage them to sign up.

YourCare Community®

Compatible with any EHR and functional across the inpatient and ambulatory settings, our patient portal YourCare Community® helps bring continuity to the patient-provider relationship.

To learn more, download our brochure here.

To learn more, reach out to us at inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278.

Whether it’s tedious documentation or squashing technical bugs, almost all organizations have some frustration with their EHR.

When you look at user feedback throughout the industry, it sounds like much of this software is in imminent danger of being downloaded to a hard drive and carted off to be pulverized in a copier from Office Space.

How could something as inevitable and promising as the digitization of health records get us here?

The Conflict Between Doctors and EHRs

As more and more physicians become employees instead of independent practitioners, EHRs have become emblematic of the loss of autonomy these practitioners feel, which has, in recent years, led to a burnout-related flight from the healthcare industry.

Physicians feel more isolated, have a smaller voice, and contend with diminishing public trust, eroded by politics around the pandemic response. They feel distant from decision-makers and have little control over their work environment.

When an EHR interface limits a physician’s treatment options at the bedside, requires them to constantly explain misleading data, or bogs them down in documentation, it can feel like yet another external force coming between them and what’s best for their patients.

The core problem: few of these products were built by doctors.

Clinician-Driven Design

As technology continues to evolve, hospitals and healthcare systems of all sizes should partner with EHR vendors who offer solutions created and continuously evolved through careful listening to the needs of clinicians and hospital leadership.

When shopping for potential vendors or considering  how best to optimize your current EHR, be sure to look for these crucial components of a clinician-driven design:

Streamlined documentation

Because physicians and nurses spend a great deal of time documenting patient encounters and entering information,  streamlining documentation can reduce time spent on administrative tasks and give providers more face time with their patients.

Efficient clinical workflows

An EHR designed to enhance patient care and safety while delivering an exceptional experience should be based on the workflow of clinicians.

Simplified care coordination

Care coordination for patients is an imperfect science, but a scheduling feature can streamline the entire process for everyone involved. An easy-to-use platform allows providers to schedule a patient’s follow-up appointments and upcoming hospital procedures quickly, while hospitals can schedule follow-up care and share clinical information across platforms.

Better communication between providers and patients

EHR patient portals offer patients and caregivers secure, online access to their personal health records and tools to interact with their providers. Patients can use their portal to view lab results, request medication refills, send messages to physicians, and upload documents. Similarly, provider portals allow clinicians to review patient records and  communicate more efficiently with patients.

Enhanced patient safety

Advanced EHR technology should promote  key patient safety considerations through clinical decision support embedded into workflows.

Reduced physician burnout

Physician burnout can contribute to medical errors, problems with care quality, and even cause physicians to leave the practice.   Some basic features of an EHR can help physicians fight fatigue, specifically through customizable systems, streamlined documentation with time-saving features, and software optimization to maximize the physician experience and reduce administrative burdens

MEDHOST EHR: Built by Clinicians for Clinicians

The intuitive interface of MEDHOST EHR was designed by clinicians for clinicians, meaning your team can spend less time hunting down records and patient data and more at the bedside, improving outcomes.

Watch a demo to see how our EHR supports and empowers your teams throughout every stage of the patient journey.

To learn more about how your EHR can act as a problem-solver in your hospital or healthcare organization, email us at inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278 to speak with one of our specialists.

population-management-inside-out-case-studyToday’s patient is now a consumer, expecting an exchange of health information rather than directives. Care has become more transactional, and the patient is now the CEO.

After exploring a variety of healthcare IT solutions, few aligned with Mt. San Rafael Hospital's vision. Partly aided by a long-standing partnership with MEDHOST, the rural Colorado hospital was one of the first providers to beta test the YourCare Community® Patient and Provider Portal solution.

Download the case study to learn how this critical access hospital increased patient satisfaction and engagement with a cloud-based patient portal solution.

As the healthcare marketplace evolves, focusing on improving patient experiences has become a top strategy for improving a hospital’s bottom line.

Keeping in step with healthcare’s fast pace and in adherence to patient-centered care, MEDHOST will be rolling out some important new features in 2020 to help optimize the patient experience and improve provider workflows in our patient portal, YourCare Community.

One of our top goals for the upcoming year is to help hospitals improve patient engagement and provide patients with better access to their healthcare information through self-service tools. By concentrating more energy on enhancing YourCare Community and our other patient engagement solutions we can:

About YourCare Community Patient Portal

Currently, YourCare Community enables healthcare providers to share health data with patients and also allows patients to perform some basic care management tasks. Some of the most useful functions include:

In 2020, we will be expanding the YourCare Community patient portal to fulfill other patient and provider needs.

What’s Next in Patient Engagement for 2020?

Our goal is to give providers and consumers a single platform from which they can manage a variety of healthcare coordination tasks. Plans to create a more robust and convenient patient engagement solution will also involve the addition of several self-service functionalities into YourCare Community.

Planned self-services will include:

In addition to offering patients more self-service, hospitals will also be able to use the YourCare Marketing Services to improve patient engagement. On behalf of the hospital and through Marketing Services, MEDHOST can create and deliver professionally tailored patient communications like newsletters, event notifications, health check-up reminders, and other curated healthcare content.

With more self-service options and streamlined patient communications, hospitals can take strides towards developing stronger bonds with their community and increasing their overall visibility.

Improving Patient Experiences with YourCare Community

For MEDHOST customers who subscribe to YourCare Community but have not opted-in for the improved version, access to the new features will take some action. Customers who are not using YourCare Community, as well as those who choose to remain in the older version, will be missing out on several consumer-centric methods for improving patient experience.

If this is your first-time hearing about these exciting new features, now is the time to opt-in to the upgraded platform and begin infusing improved patient experiences into every service line. Turning a focus to patient needs—from a healthcare customer perspective—can illustrate just how much a hospital cares about the community it serves.

Stay tuned on the progress of these YourCare Community developments and more. For more information on MEDHOST patient engagement solutions, call 1.800.383.6278.

In theory, a patient portal should improve medical care for everyone. Patients can access online health records, send secure messages, and view their care plan digitally. Providers can share test and lab results, request digital paperwork, and manage appointments. Problem is, sometimes it’s all too difficult to convince patients to use your portal.

Despite the promise of improved access to health records and direct access to a physician, there’s plenty of room for patient portal engagement to grow. According to a recent ONC data brief, as of 2017, about 52 percent of patients have been offered online access to their medical record, and over half of them viewed their record within the past year. That number represents only about 28 percent of patients nationwide.

While those numbers are better than they were a few years ago, it’s clear that providers need to do a little extra work to get patients excited about using a patient portal.

How to Make a Patient Portal More Engaging

If you’re trying to boost your portal engagement, start by encouraging every patient to use it. Surveys show that about 63 percent of individuals who were encouraged to use their online medical record accessed it within the past year. Sometimes an extra nudge goes a long way. On top of that, here are a few things you can do to make your portal more engaging:

  1. Make a good impression.

    User experience is always important--but in the case of making your patient portal more engaging, it’s one of the most important things you need to consider. Your portal should be intuitive and easy to use, and updates to the patient’s medical record should be made quickly. Ultimately, your patient portal should deliver vital information--including test results, care plan instructions, and prescriptions--in a format that is easy to access and understand.

  2. Make your portal part of the communications strategy.

    Healthcare organizations and doctor’s offices that have high patient portal adoption rates use their portals for everything possible. Whether a patient wants to view their latest test results, ask the doctor a question, or schedule a new appointment, refer them to your portal. You can also make your portal feel indispensable by responding quickly to messages, making patients feel like they have a direct line of communication to you through secure messaging. And be sure to close the loop by connecting your portal to a medical CRM where individual patient data can be easily accessed (find recommendations for great medical CRMs here).

  3. Offer continuing education.

    It’s not enough simply to introduce the portal and hope patients use it. When your system updates, changes features, or adds new tools, you need to communicate those changes to patients. Explain the updates in person, send messages through the portal, and consider making handouts or brochures to help every patient continue to understand how to best use their online health record.

  4. Provide learning opportunities.

    In general, patients trust information from their doctors, even if they are still tempted to research their health concerns on the Internet. Offering educational materials about diet, exercise, chronic conditions, and general health can keep your patients coming back to the portal more often. If patients can access information related to their own health problems, they may view the portal as something designed to help them, not just their doctor’s office.

  5. Make it personal.

    Don’t wait for patients to come to you through the portal. Send personal messages to check on them--especially after they start a new medication or receive a new diagnosis. You can also send articles or support group information tailored to their personal health. When patients experience direct access to their physician, they may be more likely to log in regularly.

With a few efforts to make your patient portal more engaging, you can increase engagement and provide a better service to your patients while improving operational efficiency within your organization.

 


 
Jessica Barrett is a writer for TechnologyAdvice.com.She is a Nashville-based freelance writer specializing in healthcare, wellness, and lifestyle content. In addition to writing for national outlets such as USA Today, she works with a variety of healthcare companies to create patient engagement and education programs.

As hospitals work to meet new demands brought about by a rise in healthcare consumerism, they’re looking toward more patient-centric solutions for improving patient flow. Streamlined patient portals are at the top of the list.

Patient flow refers to the process in which patients move through a hospital or other healthcare setting. That’s why the effort to smooth patient flow through the use of a patient portal system is appealing to both patient and provider. Consider how the use of a more efficient, patient-centered resource could improve admission handoffs and the discharge process alone, not to mention appointment requests, prescription questions or refills.

How Providers Can Reduce Costs and Boost Patient Satisfaction

For providers, it's no longer enough to optimize patient flow to save money on staffing, improve safety, and reduce readmission rates. It’s also important to find solutions that boost patient satisfaction, which means cutting out any unnecessary processes or procedural steps, reducing delays to care, and enabling more direct communication between patients and physicians.

For example, if a patient is discharged from the hospital, but needs to schedule a follow-up appointment and get a prescription filled ,but no one walked them through the unnecessarily complex portal or scheduling system, the still-recovering patient could quickly become confused or frustrated, and the likelihood of them securing that recommended appointment and prescription significantly diminishes.

As a solution to helping ensure comprehensive care for patients after they see a doctor, patients needing a prescription filled can use the MEDHOST portal, or if they need a refill, they can use the YCE app and request their prescription directly from the pharmacy. They could also request a refill from a clinician via a secure message.

Patients seeking more control over their health increasingly demand simplicity—and will be turned off by a confusing portal platform. An easy-to-use interface that enables a seamless flow of communication and information between the patient and provider contributes to an improved patient experience, boosts retention, and keeps organizations competitive for the long term.

Patient Portal Benefits for Providers

WIth patient flow optimization in mind, MEDHOST’s patient portal offers the following streamlined benefits to help empower patients and improve patient outcomes:

Care coordination is an imperfect system rife with ever-shifting complexities and unknowns, but the right patient-centered system can help your organization prioritize the patient experience and improve patient flow.

For a deeper dive into how to improve patient flow or more information about how MEDHOST’s portals empower both patients and providers, click here.

YourCareEverywhereTM is especially a health and wellness consumer engagement solution that activates patients and consumers in your community through digital and mobile programs.

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