Discover the Next-Generation Patient Portal
We’ve identified 8 criteria that practices should consider when selecting patient portal software:
- Visual branding
- Usability and user interface
- Ability to sign up patients
- Features
- Overall product vision
- Integration
- Setup, training, and maintenance
- Meaningful Use
The Big Picture
Let’s begin with the big picture and our vision, and then we’ll cover each of the criteria. Think of your patient portal as your ultimate employee. Many laborious tasks handled manually by your staff can now be automated. The key motivators for most practices to offer a patient portal are:
- Send lab results electronically
- Offload phone calls to convenient secure messaging
- Meet Meaningful Use
- Automate communication with patients
- Offer a more convenient patient experience
First-Generation Patient Portals and Their Drawbacks
Your patient portal will make an impact on your practice to the extent it can do the above items well. First-generation patient portals recognized the problems they were trying to solve, but as with many first attempts, there were challenges:
Low Patient Sign-Up Rates
One first-generation patient portal vendor publicly admitted that they struggled to sign up more than 17% of the patient base of any practice. The first problem was usability — our own internal tests of publicly available screenshots showed us that users simply couldn’t figure out how to actually sign up. The second problem was lack of support from the vendor. Practices would sign up for a first-generation patient portal, have it installed, and then nothing would happen unless patients registered themselves proactively. The first generation has showed us that doesn’t work.
Overall Poor Usability
When designing software, clarity of what you want to create is everything. First-generation patient portals were blazing new ground and developing software while clarifying their product vision. The result is a clunky user interface that is likely to confuse patients. Compare Omedix PortalPlus screenshots to any of our competitors and judge for yourself.
A Fragmented Product Vision
First-generation patient portal vendors wanted to somehow connect doctors and patients online, but they pushed the vision from multiple angles in search of a business model that worked. Some vendors began by building the patient portal not for doctors but health insurance companies! The thinking was that if patients used secure messaging instead of in-person visits, the insurance company would incur a lower cost per patient. This model ultimately lost out to the more practice-centric or community-centric model today, but the system’s core features and functionality are still built around the original model.
As the industry gained clarity about the role of the patient portal, vendors could shift their business strategies, but not their system architectures. The result is software that has often been made to do things it was never designed to do. This created unexpected behavior and slowed innovation. Company resources were involved “making it work” instead of “making it better.”
Exclusive Relationships Stymied Healthy Competition
Some first-generation patient portal vendors established early relationships with EHR vendors to be the exclusive official provider of their patient portal. While this provided the assurance of integration “backed by the company,” it also removed competition, leading to first-generation patient portals that grew stale and were under no pressure to innovate.
Why We Created PortalPlus: the Second-Generation Patient Portal
PortalPlus by Omedix is a second-generation patient portal. We began development in early 2009 and have taken full advantage of the rapid advances in technology in the last 5 years. PortalPlus is distinguished by 3 ideas:
- Create an Amazing User Experience
Omedix began as a dedicated website design company and designing great user experiences has been a fundamental part of our company from our first days. Throughout the entire patient portal, every page is created with design, branding, and user experience in mind.
- Embrace Web 2.0 and Health 2.0
In the last 5 years we have seen the emergence of social networking, user-generated content, and online communities. These concepts are of profound importance on the Web, but how do they apply to healthcare? At every step, we have incorporated key ideas and insights from the Web community in a way that makes sense uniquely for healthcare. - Automate, Personalize, and Enhance (APE)
The “APE” philosophy has guided us to a cohesive product vision. How can we help medical practices use the Web to automate by giving patients more functionality? How can we personalize the patient experience based on information we know about the patient through robust EMR integration? How can we enhance the overall patient experience?
Finally, we asked ourselves what didn’t work in first generation patient portals, and we directly addressed those issues:
- We make sign-up clearly visible
- We make great usability fundamental – not incidental to PortalPlus
- We have an integrated product vision to offer a complete “platform” for enabling physicians, their colleagues, and their patients, to communicate online securely and in a variety of ways.
PortalPlus on the Eight Key Criteria
Our ultimate goal is to deliver the best patient portal in the USA. Now let’s look at how Omedix compares to the first generation patient portals on a detailed basis:
1. Visual Branding
PortalPlus features Web 2.0 design, gorgeous custom headers created for each client, and consistent branding on every page of the patient portal.
2. Usability and User Interface
After we determined our vision for PortalPlus, we worked with well-known visual design consultants and our inhouse design team to create a user experience based on the latest thinking in usability, while employing extensive user testing and iterative design.
3. Ability to Sign Up Patients
As a second-generation patient portal, we knew that getting patients to actually register is a critical measure of a successful deployment. We put considerable thought into how to make patient sign up as easy as possible, and engineered a complete client deployment process to ensure that each client reaches their full patient portal potential.
4. Features
As a newer system, Omedix PortalPlus offers a more sophisticated approach to online appointment requests, online Rx refill requests, and secure messaging. Over the coming months, Omedix will progressively roll out and automatically deploy even more new features.
First-generation vendors’ technology is older and more mature. Omedix’s technology does lack certain features that our competitors have, but it’s also newer and more nimble . We believe that within a timeframe that will be immaterial to your practice, we will have substantially all of the features our competitors have (in addition to many unique features of our own!).
5. Overall Product Vision
As you browse this website, you will learn elements of our long-term product vision. We believe practices who choose Omedix PortalPlus will be significantly better positioned down the line as we continue to enhance our product.
6. Integration
Although in some cases we are not the “official” patient portal provider for a given EHR vendor, for every EHR system with which we integrate, we invest considerable time, thought, energy and resources into creating a high-quality, robust integration. We engage the EHR system community, learn the idiosyncracies, and study the users to ensure we can provide real value and exceed the expectations of our clients. In some cases, we even outperform the “official” provider!
7. Setup, Training and Maintenance
Omedix PortalPlus is hosted entirely in the cloud. Omedix manages all hosting and all setup. For integration mode, the only setup required is connecting PortalPlus to your EHR system, for which Omedix also takes full responbility. All security, monitoring, and other maintenance tasks are handled entirely by Omedix. Every PortalPlus client is always using the latest version of the software. We also provide our signature Omedix-quality customer service to ensure that each implementation is managed to success.
8. Meaningful Use
If we integrate with your EHR system, we can help you meet Meaningful Use.
