The internet is flooded with information that pertains to how healthcare professionals have aspired to engage their patients using health IT applications like patient portals. On one hand they want to abridge the ever existing patient-physician communication gap to improve care coordination, while, on the other hand coming up to par with the government’s requirement is also a concern. One could come up with tons of reasons to justify the use of patient portals to improve patient engagements. So, let’s talk about some of the obvious reasons.
Maintaining paper based records has always been a problem for both patients and physicians. Not only were these records susceptible to errors but also prone to being misplaced. Fortunately, patient portal have eliminated these problems by digitizing the information. Patients can easily access and retrieve all the relevant information in a digitized format whenever they want. Since the information is available on online servers, an internet connection can make the task more easy than ever imagined.
We all know, it all starts with scheduling an appointment. Patients once had to make telephonic calls to physician, and on top of that, it would feel like the elongated “waiting on the line” minutes would never come to an end. Patient portals have simplified this laborious activity by allowing patients to schedule appointments online. You simply login to your portal and schedule your appointments according to the available slots of the physicians.
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“I believe, the reasons, that patient portals are being deployed at such an incredible pace is that they allow for 24/7 patient-physician connectivity. Physicians can share information with their patients and educate them on their diagnosis without physically being present around. If care provision becomes so easy, what else do we need?” says a Michigan based health IT consultant.
The newly developed concept of patient engagement seems to be taking over the archaic methods of connectivity. As the time passes by, more physicians and patients are going to adopt this technology. Since patient portals have an abundance of benefits to offer, it would not be unreasonable to expect patient portals changing the infrastructure of healthcare continuum. In fact, according to estimates, by the end of 2014, approximately 75% of the hospitals around US would be deploying patient portals to keep the patients and physicians connected at all times.
