Patient Communication Portal

An Internet-based portal could serve as a patient’s virtual, secured, gateway to your practice. Patients can review and pay bills, request appointments, research health topics, review personal health information, complete medical forms, and update their profiles and contact information. Some portals only allow patients to view demographic and medical history data, while others provide real-time lab results updates. The data available to the patient through the patient portal often depends upon the portal vendor, as well as the standards at the particular healthcare facility.

Online patient portals are emerging as an important tool for improving communication between physicians and their patients, and as a means of empowering patients to become more engaged in managing their healthcare. These tools aren’t just for desktop computers anymore, either; healthcare organizations are leveraging patient portals for mobile use and patients are responding. According to research 58 percent of healthcare professionals connect with their patients via mobile optimized patient portals.

Patient portals are being adopted by a growing number of physicians, hospitals, and healthcare clinics . Some portals allow patients to upload health information for physicians to view, while others give patients access to their health information online.

Some of the benefits of providing online access to health information include:

• empowering patients to take an active role in their healthcare
• helping patients to better understand their medical condition
• bolstering patient adherence to healthcare advice and the taking of medications
• engaging patients to confirm that their health record is correct and complete, which may assist in reducing errors
• giving patients another way to communicate with their physician, which is convenient and secure
• Easy and quick online payments for both biller and patient
• Secure messaging features can help boost chronic disease management.
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If your practice has been putting off using the patient portal, here are some reasons to get started now:

1. Send and receive messages. This effective way of communicating cuts down on long phone conversations and allow patients to ask questions between appointment.
   

• make appointments
  
• request medication refills themselves
• schedule and book appointments
• review schedules
• referrals
• optimize medical office workflow
• complete medical history
• view messages sent by the clinic