The benefits of patient portals

Patient Portals are fast becoming popular tools to enable patients to interact and communicate with their health service online. Portals can have a range of capabilities including:

• Viewing appointments

• Scheduling appointments

• Downloading and submitting forms

• Update demographic details

• Viewing parts of the clinical record – test results and discharge summaries

Governments and health care facilities in Australia regularly highlight patient access to clinical information as an essential component for building a more effective, equitable and safer health care system. Portals can help patients access their own medical information and can help to enhance care coordination across health services. Patient portals which interface with hospitals electronic medical record systems not only provide patients with the ability to view appointments and clinical information recorded in their Electronic Medical Record (EMR), but also enable the potential to review and add to their records and communicate with health professionals.

The more capability offered by the portal, the more potential benefits for patients. However, increased capability can sometimes introduce greater risk. For example, a patient may wish to view their test results online but ensuring that security and privacy is safeguarded can be challenging to achieve.

Patient portals don’t just enable benefits for patients, there is scope for health care organisations to support the delivery of care, improve system efficiency and potentially save money too. One of the first web-based patient portals to be developed in Australia, the Mater Patient Portal (MPP) was designed for maternity patients as an alternative to the paper-based Pregnancy Health Record. It is through the MPP that maternity patients can complete their hospital registration form online, obtain current health information about their pregnancy (via their Mater Shared EMR) as well as access a variety of support tools to use during their pregnancy such as tailored public health advice, Mater Mothers’ Hospital brochures and approved external links.

Upon the commencement of the project, and as part of the over-arching Benefits Plan, 2 key areas of benefits were identified in association with stakeholders. The primary benefit of the patient portal was to enhance the quality and safety of care, this was expected to be achieved via:

1. Sharing clinical information to support timely decision making

2. Supporting mothers to make informed healthcare choices through access to tailored healthcare information, brochures and credible external links

3. Encouraging mothers to adhere to the recommended care pathway and schedule of visits

4. Providing access to consolidated information enabling an overview of the history of the mother and her pregnancy

In addition, the scope to achieve system efficiency benefits was identified via:

1. Ability to complete pre-registration information online

2. Electronic information could not be misplaced or forgotten – unlike paper

One year after go-live the percentage of Mothers who accepted the invitation to create a patient portal was 60%, the majority of these viewed their EMR, their appointment schedule and a minority submitted their birth preferences online.

The majority (65.8%) of mothers thought that the EMR improved their ability to understand and recall appointments and almost half (48.1%) thought that with the EMR they were less likely to repeat pregnancy information to caregivers.

For more information please visit:

http://dx.doi.org/10.12826/18333575.2014.0011.Forster