Advisory Panel: Patient Portals

The HIStalk Advisory Panel is a group of hospital CIOs, hospital CMIOs, practicing physicians, and a few vendor executives who have volunteered to provide their thoughts on topical industry issues. I’ll seek their input every month or so on an important news developments and also ask the non-vendor members about their recent experience with vendors. E-mail me to suggest an issue for their consideration.

If you work for a hospital or practice, you are welcome to join the panel. I am grateful to the HIStalk Advisory Panel members for their help in making HIStalk better.

This question this time: Do you have a patient portal, and if so, what can patients do on it?

We have a new patient portal from Epic that was implemented as of August 1. Currently, you can view results, appointments and prescriptions on-line or on your mobile device, send messages to your provider, and pay your bill. It also has health maintenance alerts. Future functionality will include self-scheduling of appointments.

We’re working on the policy & procedure of what we want patients to do in the portal before we start actually implementing.

We currently have a patient portal from our outpatient EHR vendor. Over the next year we anticipate migrating to an enterprise patient portal that will cover both our hospital and physician practice arenas. Currently patients can: see basics of their medical information, request appointments, request medication refills, send a medical question, receive documents, pay their bill, and research health information using a provided library.

Yes – custom built. Patients can see lab results, see their meds and allergies, request changes to these, request appointments, pay bills, send a message to their PCP. 

We have been live for many years and focus on what we think patients want to do most: Communicate with their doctors, Communicate with admin staff (e.g. billing, referrals), and request appointments. We will eventually add in the ability to view their EMR data, but it has not actually been a big request from most patients. The key has always been around communication. 

We use Epic’s MyChart. It went live last September. In the first release, patients have access to refill requests, appointment requests, and portions of their medical record, visit history, and upcoming appointments. Future releases will increase functionality and data access.

We do but for Allscripts/Clinic services only. Not much right now, scheduling details, and that’s about it. Not all offices have the feature enabled.

Yes but it is not yet live. Includes: access their billing statements; pay bills online; request and manage appointments; view, print, and securely email their medical information; access discharge instructions to improve patient care;  update their information and manage their medical history.

MyChart of course. Pts can: request appts, send messages, view all sorts of stuff (visit summaries, letters, etc.). We are just now going live with questionnaires (health summaries) and health maintenance reminders.

We have a patient portal for the hospitals but due to having disparate systems (hospitals vs ambulatory clinics) will require multiple portals or will use our HIE.

Yes. View lab results, delayed until released by the physician, and browse patient education material, tailored to their age, gender, ICDs and CPTs. Editorial: our patients should be able to see their entire record, and lab results as soon as they are available, not pending review by the physician.