Before implementing a Patient Portal, try to get some feedback from the people who will be using it— the patients. Distributing a short survey in the waiting area will not only help determine what the patients need from the Portal, it will also provide an opportunity to introduce it and future changes. After receiving responses from the survey, determine what areas patients will use, and design the Portal with those in mind. If paper and pen are too cumbersome, utilize social media. Post a quick poll and get feedback that way.

The easiest way to get patients to use the Patient Portal is to make sure it offers practical features. Features that save your patients time are valuable, and increase the likelihood they will use it. Online scheduling, prescription refills, and referral forms are all features that drive up the convenience factor for patients. Including these in your Portal is a good idea because they are practical and handy for the patient.

Some offices may offer an incentive for first time portal users. This is beneficial because it can get users that may not have explored it otherwise on board and trying it. Offering a coupon for services after or having a raffle for goods may be an incentive for using the Portal that works in your office. Picking a random winner from patients that used the online scheduling feature can also be a good way to encourage Portal use.

One of the most important things to remember when implementing a Patient Portal is to never stop encouraging people to use it. If patients aren’t aware of it, they can’t utilize the features. Also, if it isn’t easy to access or register for, the likelihood they will use it also decreases. Make it simple, easy to use, and easy to find. Remember: they don’t have to use the Portal, but if it is easier and faster than a phone call, they will want to. Don’t be discouraged if the numbers expected aren’t reached immediately. It takes time to spread the word and get people motivated. The reward is well worth the effort!

• on the phone booking appointments
• handling Rx refill requests
• dealing with administrative or clinical questions from patients
• manually entering data from handwritten patient forms into the EHR and/or PM
• dealing with bill payments

If you can imagine as much as half of that phone activity and data entry being accomplished with no staff interaction, you’re seeing the potential dollars and cents impact of integrating a patient portal with your EHR and Practice Management systems.

Now that patient portal technology has matured (to the point where it will be required to achieve Meaningful Use Stage 2 starting in 2014), practices may be well advised to take a second look at the real workflow streamlining (read: cost reduction) that can be achieved with a truly integrated patient engagement system.

The Two Keys to Patient Portal ROI:

Getting ROI on your patient portal amounts to just two keys:

1. Getting patients to use it
2. Setting up efficient workflows

Getting Patients To Use The Portal

We know that many patients are quite interested in using online communication instead of the phone for most of their interactions with the practice (see blog post “Will Patients Use the Portal?”). They don’t like waiting on hold any more than your staff likes scrambling to find information while dealing with multiple patient calls simultaneously.

But our experience shows that patients do not beat a path to your patient portal.  Rather, they respond when your promote it.  Make sure you showcase the portal in your waiting room, front office staff are trained for when patients are checking in and checking out, and most importantly that you have staff buy-in that this is a solution that will improve the practice.

Omedix clients also get access to our Customer Support team for several personalized, effective strategies for improving patient use of patient portals and increasing typical registration rates for patient portals.

Setting Up Efficient Workflows

Now that patients are actually transacting on the portal, the next key is to make sure that their participation means more efficient workflows for you.

The key here is integration.  With integration of portal, EHR and PM systems, some labor-intensive functions can be totally automated, while others can be made significantly more efficient. For that reason, integration into systems like NextGen, Centricity, Allscripts, SRS, IO PracticeWare, and others becomes important. Check out Omedix integrations to see if we integrate with your PM/EHR.

Key workflows require tight integration with your existing systems, which is why it’s important to distinguish between “interfacing” and “integrating”.  It’s not just about getting one system to read data from the other, but making sure that your full workflows are accounted for.

Assuming you’ve got the integration you need, the training you need, the workflows defined, and the patients to use it, now you’ve got some real value being created:

• Patient intake will be streamlined
• Appointment booking, changing and cancellation will be done all electronically
• Patient questions, both administrative and clinical, will be answered with less use of staff and physician time
• Qualification for enhanced reimbursement through Meaningful Use
• Plus some “soft” values like an enhanced patient experience that encourages both retention and referral

While the revolution in health care is just beginning and Omedix is working on some exciting things to come, there are real ROI benefits from systems that are available right now.

You’ll recall (and if you don’t recall you can read it here) that Josh asked if patients would use the portal, and his answer, based on research and personal observation, was a resounding yes, as long as the practice promotes the portal.

Today I’m looking at the opposite side of the puzzle  – examining what practices can do to get all their physicians up and running on the patient portal – because the true benefits of the tool can only be realized when both staff and the doctors are on board.

Whenever people are faced with the prospect of something new, the nearly universal response is “What’s in it for me?” So our first order of business is outlining why the patient portal and patient engagement matter to doctors.

Benefit #1: More Efficient Workflow

Practices that have implemented the portal tell us their doctors are most appreciative of the fact that it actually improves their workflow. This is most evident in the handling of patient questions where it takes about one minute using the portal as compared with about five minutes each using the phone.

Of course, patient portals often require training for doctors and staff.  Patient portal companies like Omedix generally help train the physicians and office staff on the patient portal software so that doctors are clear on how to use the new workflows.

Benefit #2: Reduced Call Volume

Josh recently met with a cardiology practice that set a goal of cutting their 500,000 yearly patient phone calls in half. Physicians were frustrated that their staff were always on the phone and got excited about using the portal to replace many of those phone calls. They expect that communicating through the portal will boost the efficiency and clinical quality of practice-patient communications, thereby helping to control office costs while making life more convenient for patients. Even the patients who still prefer the phone are expected to be happier with less time on hold.

Benefit #3: Meaningful Use Compliance

The doctors will also be interested to know that, starting in 2014, a patient portal is a requirement to meet Meaningful Use Stage 2. Not only must you have a portal, but you must be able to show that it’s being used: MU Stage 2 requires minimum levels of utilization by both patients and the practice, so it’s a good idea for doctors to get used to it sooner rather than later.

Plus, the ability to communicate with patients by HIPAA-compliant online messaging will add a new level of comfort for doctors who may have been using regular email. Portal-EHR integration also assures that doctor-patient communications are easily documented.

Benefit #4: Appear Progressive

Finally, one more motivating factor is that while they’re increasing efficiency and assuring compliance, doctors also want to be seen by present and prospective patients as up-to-date with technology.

Building Physician Adoption

Once the doctors are on board, what kind of patterns do we observe about adoption? Interestingly, we usually find that the doctors are either thrilled about their new patient portal or completely apathetic about it. Then some event happens – they talk to a colleague, a patient complains, they see a competitors using it – and suddenly interest surges. And then they want every question answered immediately.

In addition to our customer support program, we’ve found that a good way to help doctors get comfortable with the portal is to make sure their physician extenders (Medical Assistant or others) are trained in advance. That way, when the doctor is ready to take the plunge, the trusted associate standing right next to her can provide the tips that make it easy.

So the answer to the question “Will doctors use the Patient Portal?” is yes, once they experience the workflow, have access to an in-office portal guru, and understand the benefits of embracing patient engagement.

But will patients use your patient portal?

When we speak with new clients, this is a constant concern, and we do understand it.  All these tools for patient self-service are great, but how do you know if patients will actually take the time to sign up and use the new services?

We now have enough experience to definitively respond to this question.  The short answer to “will they use it?” is “Yes, but you have to have staff buy-in, and you have to promote it.”

A Tale of Two Practices

I’d like to demonstrate with a brief personal story.  When I last visited my primary care provider a few months ago, I went through the usual annual physical regimen.  Part of that included an EKG and to my surprise, my doctor found a potential heart defect — a right bundle branch block — that could be nothing but that I should get checked out by a cardiologist just in case.

So I booked an appointment with the cardiologist, got an echo, and fortunately the cardiologist considered the episode completely benign.

Now fast forward a few weeks, and I was asked by my insurance agent to gather all my medical records, which sent me back to both clinics.  At this point, 3 weeks into the request, I am still waiting for a copy of my report from both practices.

What is significant about this rather uninteresting story?  Well, both of these providers have patient portals, and in both cases absolutely no effort was made by anyone — doctor or staff — to inform me about the portal, get me to use it, encourage me to get my results online, etc.

Finally out of sheer curiosity, while checking out from my cardiologist appointment, I pretended that I didn’t know they already had a patient portal on their website.

Me: “Do you have some kind of online service I can use to see my medical record or book appointments in the future?”

Staff Member: “Oh, I think they were trying to set something up but it’s not set up yet, so I don’t think we have anything.”

That’s an interesting response because (a) it was inaccurate, and (b) the fact that there’s a “they” and not a “we” tells me this person has zero ownership of the patient portal initiative.  Because I know the industry, I happen to know this cardiology practice pays about $600/month, or $7,200/year for this service, and what value are they getting out of it?  Well, in my professional estimation, none!

What a High-Utilization Practice Looks Like

In contrast to the two practices above, as the CEO of Omedix, I obviously study utilization data across our clients to see how things are going.  One of our highest-utilizing clients is less than 10 doctors, in primary care, and run by a younger-than-average practice manager who has an iPhone, iPad, and loves technology.

In his practice, all staff were introduced to the portal and encouraged to tell every patient who calls that they could have booked their appointment online.  The signs that we sent them to promote the portal are posted in their office.  If you call their phone line and are on hold, the patient portal is promoted, and most important of all, the staff generally recognize the value of the portal and appreciate it as a better way — in most cases — of communicating with their patients.

How to Build Adoption and Utilization

The takeaway above is basically to gain staff buy-in and promote the portal to get usage out of it.  Here are some other tips:

Perhaps the most important element in ensuring patient adoption is staff training. When your staff speaks to patients about transactions that could have been handled online, they should politely tell them so. When your staff checks patients out, they should inform them of the patient portal, or even help register them on the spot.

Think of each patient interaction as an opportunity to enroll your patients in a more efficient, preferred way of communicating with them. The investment will ultimately save you time and money by empowering you to communicate with your patients in a way that is easy and efficient for your practice.

When an online service is simple and intuitive, both user satisfaction and return visits increase. Look for a patient portal solution that is easy to use, makes it easy to sign up, and is easy to get to.  All the staff at any practice are patients themselves, so just pretend you’re a patient at your own practice and see what you think.

¹http://www.harrisinteractive.com/news/allnewsbydate.asp?NewsID=1096

The investment is particularly significant for our clients, who will see even more rapid feature releases and additional innovations that deliver better ways of engaging patients.

We also view the investment as an endorsement of our success to date, and the new market we are essentially breaking open—patient engagement.

Healthcare moving in a new direction

The tides of healthcare are moving in a new direction. Healthcare must become increasingly consumer-centric, but practices today generally lack the tools necessary to seriously engage patients in ways that make a measurable impact in their operational efficiency, or in the patient experience.

The promise of patient engagement is to go from a patchwork of solutions from multiple vendors — patient portal, website, patient reminders — and unite them all under a single integrated platform.

That means you have just one integration system to manage, your patients receive one integrated experience, and each of your solutions becomes more powerful and less expensive.

It’s a disruptive change, and we’re thrilled to be leading the market in setting a new vision for how medical practices will engage their patients.

Investors with a strong track record

Back to our financing, the round was led by Long River Ventures with participation from Canal Partners, plus a national roster of private investors. We are proud to have assembled an amazing team of investors who have already added immense value to Omedix. Will Cowen of Long River Ventures has been added to our Board of Directors, and Jim Armstrong of Canal Partners is an observer to the Board.

New career opportunities at Omedix

And, of course, we will be accelerating our hiring! Omedix holds a unique position in the healthcare industry as a developer of outstanding software and provider of superb customer service.

If you are interested in helping us build great software (software engineers) or in selling it (sales), visit our careers page and submit an application at http://omedix.com/careers.

Check back for updates

We have more exciting news in the pipeline that we’ll be sharing later this year. Please check back for the latest updates.

Congratulations to all of the Omedix team who worked hard to make this possible, and to our clients who have entrusted us with their patient relationships.

Best regards and the best of health,

Josh Padnick
CEO

Why is this important to our customers?

1. Our software has passed a rigorous security and privacy review process that elevates our platform above non-certified vendors.
2. We certified our ability to provide patients with “Timely Access” to their medical record – certification criteria 170.304(g).  This means patients can have online access to their clinical information, such as lab results, medications, problem list, and medication allergy list.
3. For our customers seeking federal grant support for their EHR implementation, this certification officially deems the Omedix patient portal solution capable of enabling physicians to qualify for funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).*  Our patient portal technology tightly integrates with two EMR platforms – NextGen and GE Centricity.

Why “Timely Access”?

In order for providers to receive grant money, they have to use certified software.  A software vendor can either certify on all Meaningful Use measures and call themselves a certified “Complete EHR”, or on a select few criteria and call themselves a certified “EHR Module.”  Omedix is not in the business of developing EHR software, so why did we bother to certify?  The answer is that there are some criteria that are impossible to meet without some way for the patient to interface with the practice’s EMR system.

One of these criteria is the ability for patients to see their medical record online in real time – otherwise known as “Timely Access.”  PortalPlus is a solution to that problem – the patient registers online, passes a verification process, and can then securely see portions of their up-to-date medical record over the web.

This means the patient can log in and see all their medications (past and present) whenever they need to. They can see a list of the problems they were diagnosed with. They can even see their lab results and allergies.  Your patients will be thrilled.

So what’s next?

Release more features and certify for additional measures!  One of our next objectives is to focus on certifying for additional criteria that will help our customers meet Meaningful Use more efficiently.  These include providing the patient with an electronic copy of their entire medical record and their clinical summary in CCR or CCD format through the patient portal.  Stay tuned for an unveiling of our new personalized patient education platform as well.

PortalPlus is the next generation patient portal that’s moving patient engagement far beyond accessibility to records and results.  We’re creating a dynamic community health platform.

*To learn more about the certification requirements and Meaningful Use, the federal government’s ONC provides a wealth of information, click here.

Automatically Route Patient Requests

Many of our clients wanted the ability to have appointment requests for Dr. Jones routed to one staff member, and requests for Dr. Smith routed to another. But why stop there? In a real doctor’s office, the staff know who to notify about appointment requests based on a variety of real-world factors. At Omedix, we believe that the customer experience should be as close to the real-world as possible. As a result, we’re pleased to announce a sophisticated engine for routing online patient requests based on almost anything in the request — from requested location, to requested doctor or even appointment type.  It’s almost like a smart virtual receptionist, who always delivers patient request information to the people who need it most!

For our current clients, this feature is already live.  You’ll just need to work with your Omedix Support Rep to activate it.

Filter Providers by Location

Another popular request was the ability to allow patients to request an appointment only with those providers who are available at the location the patient selected. This feature is now live for all clients as well, and also needs to be activated with an Omedix Support Rep.

Integrated Online Bill Pay

Omedix clients can now enjoy an integrated online bill pay experience.  When your patients log into the patient portal, if you’ve ordered online bill pay, they will now see that feature available directly.

Various Goodies

Finally, we’ve improved some of the plumbing to make your day-to-day management easier.  Practice administrators now have ability to edit practice user information and deactivate users, the auto-logout time interval is now controllable directly by your organization and can be extended up to 45 minutes.

Summary

At Omedix, we pride ourselves in our ability to release innovative, exciting features on a regular schedule. As a result, something new is always right around the corner!

Please check back often for more feature announcements and other interesting information.

A Quick Overview of Meaningful Use

The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act authorized the US government to spend billions of dollars to incentivize the adoption of electronic health record (EHR) software through the HITECH program. Any “Eligible Provider” at a medical practice can receive up to $44,000 over a 4-5 year period in exchange for using “Certified EHR technology” and meeting the “Meaningful Use” objectives.

The Role of a Patient Portal in Meeting Meaningful Use

The foundation of Meaningful Use is, of course, having a certified EHR system, but there are some objectives that are cumbersome or even impossible to achieve without a patient portal. These fall into two main categories – (1) providing patients with direct access to parts of their health record, and (2) providing patient education.

The specific Meaningful Use measures that a patient portal can help to meet are:

• To provide patients with…
  • Timely electronic access to changes in health information (Menu Set)
  • Electronic copies of their health record (Core Set)
  • Clinical summaries after each office visit (Core Set)
  • Patient-specific education resources (Menu Set)

During Stage 1 of Meaningful Use (2011 – 2012), Providers have to meet all 15 core objectives and 5 out of the 10 menu objectives. During Stage 2 (2013 – 2014), it is likely that all the menu objectives will become mandatory and that additional requirements will be added.

Timely Access is the Most Important Measure for Patient Portals

In practice, many EHR companies have recognized that their clients want to purchase a patient portal from a third party (versus the EHR company themselves), so we have found that the EHR company will help the practice meet all the measures in Meaningful Use with the lone exception of the Timely Access measure.

One of the most interesting developments in Meaningful Use was when the Office of the National Coordinator clarified that while a practice only has to demonstrate 5 out of the 10 Menu Set measures, the practice must “possess technology” on all Menu Set measures. In other words, even if you don’t plan on demonstrating the Timely Access measure, you still need to purchase technology that is “certified” for it in order to qualify for Meaningful Use. You can learn more at http://questions.cms.hhs.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/10162.

Essentially, this means you must purchase a certified patient portal to meet Meaningful Use.

Looking in Depth at the Other Patient Portal Meaningful Use Requirements

Let’s examine these requirements one by one and see how a patient portal is either necessary or very helpful in meeting that measure.

Timely electronic access to changes in health information (Menu Set)
“More than 10% of all unique patients seen by the EP (eligible physician) are provided timely (available to the patient within four business days of being updated in the certified EHR technology) electronic access to their health information subject to the EP’s discretion to withhold certain information.”

This measure requires the practice to provide patients with real-time access to their electronic health record online. It is almost impossible to demonstrate this measure without a patient portal. The patient portal must integrate with your EHR system and have the capability to give patients a secure online account to view their medical record. The 10% usage requirement further necessitates that at least 10% of all unique patients coming through the practice’s doors sign up for the portal during the demonstration period.

Electronic copies of health records (Core Set)

“More than 50% of all patients of the eligible provider who request an electronic copy of their health information are provided it within 3 business days.”

For this measure, a patient portal is very helpful, but not indispensable. You can send patients a CD, DVD or a USB drive to satisfy the requirement. However, if your patient portal can allow the patient to view their medical record and download an e-copy ot their computer you can save on the costs and administrative burden of mailing and encrypting electronic media with that information.

Clinical summaries of office visits (Core Set)

“Clinical summaries provided to patients for more than 50% of all office visits within 3 business days.”

This measure gives you two non-portal options: 1) print out the summary right after the visit, 2) mail it immediately that evening or the next day, as you only have three business days. This can be a burdensome and expensive process if you have to do it for no less than 50% of all visits. If your patient portal connects to your EMR, it could automatically show the patient their clinical summary after it has been completed and approved! Again, mailing and administrative costs are reduced by using a patient portal to meet this measure.

Patient-specific education resources (Menu Set)
“More than 10% of all unique patients seen by the Eligible Provider are provided with patient0specific education resources.”

Practically speaking, this means that either a person or a computer program has to look into the patient’s record, see what condition they have, and provide a relevant article or video to the patient. Your office staff could manually print an article, mail an article, or let the patient watch a video while in the office. A patient portal that is integrated with an EMR and a patient education database could automatically read the ICD-9 (or soon ICD-10) code associated with the patient’s condition and send the patient the relevant articles.

Patient Portals and Meaningful Use – The Conclusion

To meet the Menu Set item “timely access to changes in health information” you must have a patient portal. For the remaining three measures, a patient portal with the right functionality can save you a tremendous amount of money on staff time, printing costs, and mailing costs, and alleviate general frustration.

If you a are a practice manager, physician, or journalist and want to learn more about how Omedix Patient Portal can help you meet meaningful use, please contact us.

Coming Next

In the next post in our Meaningful Use series, we will explore how to choose a patient portal vendor and how to know if that vendor is certified for meaningful use.

About Omedix Patient Portal

Omedix Patient Portal is a next-generation portal that differentiates itself from the competition by offering a vastly superior user experience, fine-grained customizability, a unique focus on leveraging the patient portal for marketing, and a long-term view to how your patient portal will function in the broader community. Learn more at http://omedix.com/products/patient-portal/.

But what I find is probably the most common “one big thing” is online registration. It seems almost unthinkable that when you go to a doctor’s office you still fill out all your registration forms by hand. And yet, that’s the healthcare world we live in. At the recent Winter Health IT Summit I attended, one heated panel member made the point that while you fill out those medical practice registration forms by hand, you can use your iPhone to place an order for a burrito at the nearest Chipotle.

The fact that Chipotle has more a sophisticated online experience than your typical medical practice is not the subject of this post. For this post, I wanted to describe how practices have solved the online registration problem to date. I’ll also mention how Omedix can help you, but I’ll put that toward the end. So let’s get started. Starting with the least high-tech and going to the most high-tech, how do medical practices handle the registration process?

Paper Forms

The lowest level of registration process is the hallowed paper office form. The patient arrives at the office — possibly with completed forms that have been mailed to them — and either hands them to the office staff or sits down to fill these out by hand with old-fashioned pen or pencil. Because the forms are usually comprehensive, the process typically takes 15 – 30 minutes.

Staff then painstakingly translate the information written on the form into the Practice Management System to fill out information in the patient’s account.

Summary:
The latest 1950′s technology in the modern medical practice.

PDFs on Your Website

One of the questions I was always surprised to get when we first started building websites for medical practices is “Can we put PDF forms on our website?” It turns out that is trivially easy to do, so we don’t even charge extra for it. You just give your webmaster an electronic copy of your form, he converts it to a PDF and uploads it.

The patient can now at least access the form at their leisure. Unfortunately, they still have to fill it out by hand since the PDF is almost never enabled for online submission.

Summary:
The latest 1990′s technology in the modern medical practice.

Fillable PDF’s

About 1 out of 250 times, we run across a practice that has paid someone — in some cases Omedix! — to enable their PDF’s to be fillable. The result is that it’s the same old PDF form, but the patient can now type their answers directly on the form on their computer.

This is a great convenience of course, but there’s a reason the fillable PDF never really took off: The PDF can only be printed. Since it can’t be saved unless you have expensive Adobe Acrobat software, the general concern is that this is going to cause more frustration than it reduces.

Summary:
A rare bird, and there’s a reason it hasn’t thrived in the wild.

Online Registration

At last we enter the 2000′s! With online registration, your patients go to your website and typically log into a patient portal. On the patient portal they fill out “online forms”. This is a version of your old paper registration forms, but rendered online.

The patient fills out one or more forms and presses submit. Your staff then have a separate practice portal to log into to view the submission. The forms don’t integrate with anything, but they do show up in your practice portal. It’s not the perfect solution but it’s better than paper & pencil.

Even though this isn’t the ultimate solution, there are still some horror stories out there. The biggest problem is that some vendors have created an “online forms” solution but haven’t optimized their solution to render the kinds of forms your patient registration forms look like. The result is that the forms look bad. Really bad.

When a patient sees an endless wasteland of 100 sequential fields to fill in, it’s a bit daunting and they revert back to the comfort of paper. The other area where vendors often drop the ball is how the form renders for the practice. Doctors are accustomed to seeing the medical history form a certain way. Staff are accustomed to seeing demographic forms a certain way. When these patterns get interrupted, people’s first reaction is frustration. These issues can be overcome, but be sure to watch out for them.

Summary:
It’s not quite the Apple Store, but your practice can now go electronic with patient registration.

By the way, Omedix can help you with online registration. If you’d like to learn more, feel free to Contact Us.

Online Registration with Integration

This is the exact same solution as described above, but with one beautiful enhancement: some portion of the forms patients have filled out can be sent directly to your Practice Management and/or EHR system.

Summary:
We have online forms and we have backend integration. Life is at last very good.

Omedix can also help you with online registration with integration. If you’d like to learn more, feel free to Contact Us.

Final Thoughts

Amazingly, the story’s not quite over with this blog post. There is a complementary class of solutions to online registration, but we’ll leave that for a future blog post.

Your Website
Your website is pretty much what you think of when someone says “just visit my website.”  Its most distinguishing feature is that no username or password is required to visit your website.  You simply type in www.YourPracticeWebsite.com, and up pops all the content.  All medical practice websites today have the basics — profiles of the providers, locations with directions, accepted insurances, medical services, and some general information about the practice.  Many medical practice websites also have more interactive features like patient education, online appointment requests, online bill pay, and a blog.  Again, these features do not require a username or password.

Your Website is Primarily about Marketing
Ultimately, your website is really meant to play a marketing role in your practice.  It communicates what you do, it showcases the talents of your doctors, and it encourages people to make an appointment.  To see a good example, check out http://www.azfeet.com.  This entire site is pretty much engineered to help new patients learn about the practice, and when they’re ready, to make an appointment.  The site’s usefulness is measured in terms of how many online appointment requests and how many new patients it generates.

Other clients use their site for patient education or interactivity, but in my experience the overriding goal of the public website is appearing fresh to existing patients and attracting new ones.

Your Patient Portal
A patient portal is a special secure website your patients visit to do online what they used to only be able to do by phone.  This includes things like:

• requesting an appointment
• paying a bill
• requesting an Rx refill
• receiving lab results
• viewing upcoming appointments
• viewing their outstanding balance
• registering for their first visit
• viewing their medical record

The common theme among all these items is that they are specific to a particular patient. The patient portal has to know who you are before it can reveal medical record information to you, or let you renew a prescription.  This is the single-most important difference between a patient portal and a website.  A patient portal knows who you are.  A website doesn’t know anything about you.

Based on this one requirement — that the patient portal has to know who you are — companies like Omedix have created an entire infrastructure to allow patients to create accounts and practices to verify those accounts.  Patients must then identify themselves by logging in with a username and password.  Since they want to see private information about themselves and since this information is “Protected Health Information” as defined by HIPAA, the patient portal has to be secure, log access to the patient’s medical records, and meet several other criteria.

The Relationship Between Your Website and Your Patient Portal
At the end of the day, this is the simplest thing in the world.  The only relationship between your website and your patient portal is that your website should link to your patient portal.  And that’s it!

When Omedix builds websites, we often make a point of promoting the features of the patient portal on the website, but at the end of the day, we’re still just linking to the patient portal.

Summary
- Your website doesn’t know who you are when you visit it.
- Everyone who visits your website has the exact same experience.
- Your patient portal requires the patient to log in.
- Your patient portal starts by replacing phone calls.
- Then it goes on to give an “online healthcare experience”
- The only relationship between your website and your patient portal is a link
- However, you should also use your site to heavily promote the portal