The healthcare delivery system currently being transformed is moving us much closer toward longitudinal health and a virtual care team approach.
This involves continuous and ubiquitous interaction between the care team and patients — whether they are at home, mobile or in a care facility. The process also requires integration of these interactions into the clinical record, along with remote monitor data and information on social support networks.
The patient portal is sometimes envisioned by healthcare leaders as the one-stop shop for patient-facing technologies. However, the patient portals of most electronic health record (EHR) vendors today were not designed to accommodate all of the business and functional requirements needed for population health, meeting meaningful use requirements and truly engaging patients to improve outcomes and build loyalty.
New survey findings help put these top drivers for patient engagement into perspective:
- enhance and improve the health of the community (77 percent)
- build brand loyalty for patients (77 percent)
- meet meaningful use requirements (60 percent)
The HIMSS Analytics Survey also shines a bright light on healthcare leaders questioning whether their current trajectory will lead to the increased patient involvement required to improve clinical outcomes and reduce costs.
The answer is "no" if these leaders are solely relying on the patient portals their EHR vendors can offer today. In fact, the results indicate that approximately two-thirds of these respondents are using portals provided by their EHR vendors.
EHR portals are repositories of information about the encounters of one patient and are heavily transaction-oriented. They were not conceived to be population management tools that require mechanisms to organize and analyze data from multiple sources, as well as for stratifying risks and prompting action. Other complementary technologies include customer relationship management, predictive analytics, personalization, collaboration and business intelligence.
The reasons provided by survey respondents for adopting portals are varied:
- 71 percent have an engagement strategy, are using portal technology to meet current minimum meaningful use requirements for functionality and data sharing from a single source
- 54 percent are using portals that offer a combination of patient services, technology and content
- 51 percent are using portals as a configurable, interoperable information exchange platform with data sharing from multiple sources
But healthcare leaders interviewed also question whether their organizations have a true patient engagement strategy, or simply a portal strategy — based upon a single EHR, which just isn't enough. As one leader stated, the EHR portal doesn't "actually help people manage chronic diseases, improve their health or give them resources they need to move toward healthier behaviors."
More specifically, healthcare leaders are seeking:
- functionality such as e-visits or e-consultations (80 percent)
- interoperability across multiple providers (70 percent)
- health evaluation and coaching (70 percent)
- televisits (50 percent)
The next generation of portals will need to offer the functionality that will enable patients to become partners in their own care. They will also need to have the flexibility to accommodate new, yet-undiscovered drivers and evolving needs of the healthcare delivery system.
