By Sara Heath
- It seems as though since the days of meaningful use, praise for the patient portal as the crux of patient engagement strategy has begun to wane.
After all, provider organizations adopted these tools and put them in front of patients, and they still yielded limited patient uptake. Instead, healthcare bore witness to an ecosystem of standalone patient-facing apps that have come to form the digital front door, something that does not necessarily center around the patient portal.
In 2017, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that some 90 percent of eligible hospitals and eligible clinicians offered patient portal access, but only about a third of patients actually used the tool to look at their own medical data. By and large, meaningful patient engagement with the tool was far behind providers’ hopes.
This trend continued to emerge for years after. In 2018, the American Hospital Association (AHA) likewise found that the number of providers offering patient portal access came in around 90 percent, but patients weren’t picking up the tool. And in 2019, ONC reported more of the same.
This is because despite all of its benefits, the patient portal is not a panacea. Although the technology can make it easier for patients to engage with their own medical data and perform a number of other tasks, they still look to ancillary patient engagement technologies to remain connected to their care.
READ MORE: 7 Steps to Open the Healthcare Digital Front Door, Care Access
It’s true, patients value a lot of the functions that the patient portal offers: online appointment scheduling, digital bill pay, virtual prescription refill requests. And yet, more and more third-party party vendors are coming in to fill these gaps instead of having patients utilize the functionality offered on most standard patient portals.
According to David Bradshaw, senior vice president of Consumer & Employer Solutions at Cerner, this is because the EHR companies that produce patient portals were focused on the functions mandated in meaningful use. This opened the door for third-party technology vendors.
“Cerner was late in developing some of these niche apps in this consumer-centered wave,” Bradshaw admitted during a 2019 interview with PatientEngagementHIT. “It was a known disconnect. It's not like they were asleep, but all the big EHR companies have limited resources and you got to invest them in the places that fit.”
For Cerner, creating technology partnerships with third-party patient engagement vendors presented a better solution than trying to build up a technology suite to beat them. Cerner hosts the Cerner Consumer Framework, a dashboard of patient engagement apps that most of the EHR vendor’s clients already used. This makes the apps interoperable with the patient portal and EHR, creating a seamless experience for patients and providers alike.
As of that 2019 interview, Cerner had formed partnerships with GetWellNetwork, Kyruus, a provider directory and matching tool, and AmericanWell, a major provider of telehealth services.
READ MORE: How the Patient Portal Improves Health Outcomes in Chronic Illness
Not every EHR vendor will go the way of Cerner, and that may not even be a fit for every provider. But still, “if you build it, they will come,” may not always work with the patient portal. Some providers have reported they were able to drum up active patient portal adoption by demonstrating that the tool can fill patient care access needs.
“For an individual with chronic disease who sees a physician often or touches a medical care facility often, the portal seems to have pretty obvious utility,” according to Thomas Selva, MD, chief medical information officer and pediatrician at MU Health Care.
“I can message my doctor, I can look at my labs, etc. But if you ask an otherwise healthy individual, ‘Why would you use the portal?’ they would just look at you with a blank stare and say, ‘There's nothing there.’”
Selva and his team realized that to effectively market the patient portal to their entire patient population, they needed a product worth using.
“We started asking, ‘What would bring people to the portal?’’’ he posited. “That was, again, what reduces the friction between the patient and the healthcare facility or the healthcare they're trying to acquire.”
READ MORE: Why Epic Systems Says Patient Portal Will Be Key in Virtual Care
At MU Health Care, Selva and his team worked to market the features the patient portal offered that would be useful for patients — online appointment scheduling or prescription refill requests, for example.
Something branded as a patient portal might not sound attractive to individuals who are mostly healthy, but creating an account for an online appointment scheduling platform does. In emphasizing that function, and others that are so coveted by the patient, MU Health Care was able to gin up more excitement about the patient portal.
That success notwithstanding, it’s important to remember that meaningful patient activation will require a personal touch from a provider. The patient portal, like so many other patient engagement technologies, can certainly enhance the healthcare experience, but they cannot replace it.
Providers must still lean on their patient-provider communication, empathy, education, and motivation skills in order to yield meaningful change in patient engagement.
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How Does the Patient Portal Fit into Digital Patient Engagement? - PatientEngagementHIT.com
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