Access Management Quarterly: 'Patient portal' designed for elderly patients
'Patient portal' designed for elderly patients
Preregistration function to be enhanced
A University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) project that began with the Center on Aging identifying a need to communicate better with elderly patients has become an ambitious Internet initiative encompassing the entire campus.
The Center on Aging, one of the UAMS Centers of Excellence, wanted a way to get elderly patients more involved in their own health care, specifically through an exchange between institution and patient that would tie into the electronic medical record system, says Alan Gardner, MBA, director of process and planning for the UAMS information technology (IT) department.
UAMS did a survey of its various departments to determine what functions they felt were most important to include in the patient portal, Gardner says, based on level of effort required to implement, as well as benefit to the patient and to the department itself in terms of cost savings.
Survey results, he adds, included the following functions, in the order in which they were ranked by respondents:
- preregistration;
- prescription refill request;
- appointment request;
- medications list;
- appointment viewing;
- patient education resources or links;
- requests for medical records;
- lab test results;
- medical conditions list;
- on-line bill or invoice viewing and bill payment;
- clinical care team list;
- secure patient-clinic messaging, with the nurse, physician, or appointment desk, and the integration of that messaging with the EMR system;
- ability to update insurance and registration information;
- a way-finding system that would be tapped into with the patient portal.
The project steering committee — a group of between 20 and 25 administrators, clinicians, and other interested parties that meets monthly — will determine what the policies and priorities are regarding the patient portal, Gardner says.
In addition to improving its own cash flow with on-line bill payments, UAMS thinks the patient portal will have the following benefits.
- improve patient satisfaction;
- get patients more involved in their own health care, in line with national initiatives such as consumer-driven health plans;
- reduce administrative costs;
- improve work flow through on-line preregistration and appointment requests.
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