Portals Can Work But Not The Sort Of Portal Offered By The myHR! Sad That!

This appeared last week:

Portals linked to lower rates of hospitalization, readmission

By Joseph Goedert

Published July 21 2016, 4:40pm EDT

Research still underway shows that congestive heart failure patients using a patient portal offered by a hospital or physician practice have higher engagement rates, lower hospitalization and readmission rates, and higher outpatient visit rates.

Use of portals is associated with 20 percent lower hospital admissions and a similar lower rate of readmissions, said Indranil Bardhan, a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, during a session at Health Data Management’s Healthcare Analytics Symposium in Chicago.

The higher rate of outpatient visits is a positive sign, Bardhan adds. While utilization grows, patients who get more outpatient treatment are less likely to have hospitalizations or readmissions.

Some 50 percent of all hospitals and 40 percent of all physician group practices now offer some type of portal to their patients. The portal market, he added, should near $900 million by 2017.

Bardhan and a team of researchers have been analyzing 100,000 emergency room and outpatient visits among congestive heart failure patients in the Dallas-Fort Worth region using data from the DFW Hospital Council database. The DFW database is helpful because if a patient recently had an ER or hospital visit, as many as 25 percent of those patients could have another admission at a different hospital, so the database helps better track patient encounters.

Patients use portals, an application created on top of an electronic health record, to communicate with clinicians on such issues as requesting an appointment or medication refill, viewing test results, paying and managing bills, and sending secure messages if they have questions for a provider. In the sample population studied, lab results and communicating with a provider are the most frequent uses of patient portals. Providers supplying data to the research use Epic EHRs and the MyChart portal.

More here:

http://www.healthdatamanagement.com/news/portals-linked-to-lower-rates-of-hospitalization-readmission

The paragraph that matters here is the last one!

Here are the functions offered:

1. To communicate with clinicians on such issues as requesting an appointment or medication refill,

2. Viewing test results  

3. Paying and managing bills,

4. Sending secure messages if they have questions for a provider.

It is also of note that in the sample population studied, lab results and communicating with a provider are the most frequent uses of patient portals.

So, right now the myHR is simply not doing what people want! Just typical for a system dreamed up by some bureaucrats in Canberra with no experience of the real world or real clinical needs!

David.