“If you’re not on the list, imagine your competitors’ billboards and ads,” Dr. Warren said.
The government is also educating patients on their rights to medical record access, and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology is creating an Office of Consumer eHealth.
“The Feds are not leaving this to ‘organic change,’ ” Dr. Warren said.
Patient portals will play a huge role in this new landscape. The typical portal gives patients access to basic health information, is accessible to a designated proxy, can be used on demand, and is easy to navigate. Patients can message doctors about health concerns, appointments, and refills, and can list their medications, family history, smoking status, and fill out surveys and questionnaires.
“One of the things that’s so important to recognize about portals and federal regulation is, nobody says that you must respond through the portal,” Dr. Warren said. “You do what’s appropriate to the concern that the patient raises.”
Protecting Privacy, Targeting Patients Who Want Portals
Using social media requires great care not to violate privacy laws, Dr. Warren said.
“It’s pretty clear that this can lead to better patient understanding” of their illness, he said, “as well as ownership in their role in management. They are more capable of directly participating. It allows real-time communication. It’s clearly a great patient satisfier.”
Dr. Garber said Reliant began to use an electronic health record in 2007, and 30% of patients now access a patient portal. About 1% of all patients seen by the group send a message through the portal each day, primarily to their primary care physician.
“This can be useful when they show up in an emergency room on the other side of the country,” he said. “They can go log in and show the emergency room docs most of their record so they know how to treat them properly.”
Most test results are automatically released to the portal in three days. Cancer-screening test results are sent out after 14 days, to make sure the doctor has a chance to connect with the patient first.
“Patients love that,” he said. “They can pull them up, they can watch trends, they can know whether they’re getting better or worse.”
He said originally there was some concern that, with access to messaging, patients would make a lot of contacts they otherwise would not have made. But that hasn’t been the case, he said.
