patient portals

FierceHealthcare reports:

“Researchers at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Pennsylvania reviewed 5 years of healthcare encounters at a larger primary care practice, including ‘e-visits,’ phone consultations and in-office visits, and discovered that providers that accepted e-visits actually saw a 6% increase in office visits. As a result, physicians spent more time each month seeing patients in person, which led to a 15% decline in new patients, according to the study, which will be published in Management Science.

”For the purposes of the study, e-visits were broadly defined to include patient portals, electronic communication and telemedicine. But researchers say the study unearths a new layer of unintended consequences associated with technology that may not be as beneficial as some have anticipated.”

To read the FierceHealthcare summary story on the study, please hit this link.

To read the study, please hit this link.

Photo by Amirskip4life

This HealthAffairs piece looks at more than a decade of experience engaging patients online through patient portals and offers four key lessons:

1. “Secure Email Supports Improved Outcomes And Patient-Centered Care.”

2. “Patient Portal Use Positively Impacts Patient Loyalty To The Health Plan And Member Satisfaction.”

3. “Evidence Of A Relationship Between Secure Email And Other Kinds Of Utilization Is Mixed.”

4. “Even With The Best Intentions, E-Health Disparities Can Emerge.”

Here’s part of  an update in Medical Economics 0n patient portals:

“To get patients to enroll in your portal, advises Michelle Holmes, a principal with ECG Management Consultants in Seattle, “you should use the parts of portals that will result in higher levels of customer service. That includes appointment and refill requests, lab results, health maintenance reminders, visit summaries, tracking and graphing vital signs, and secure messaging.”

“Doug Hires, executive vice president of Santa Rosa Consulting, believes that consumers care more about portal features such as appointment and refill requests than they do about viewing their records. ‘Some vendors have built in the ability to do an online consult that physicians could be paid for,’ he notes. ‘There are some really nice and robust features about access that patients respond more to than seeing their records. If physicians are myopic and just respond to view-download-transmit, they’re not going to get as much excitement out of their patient base.’”

“In a fee-for-service environment, however, the use of portals for communicating with patients, delivering results and refilling prescriptions online can reduce visit volume. Thus it is not surprising that portals tend to interest physicians more in markets where value-based reimbursement is growing faster than they do in mainly fee-for-service markets, Holmes says.”