“Occasionally we have some patients saying, ‘I don’t understand something’ that normally they wouldn’t have even asked me, but that problem has been minimal,” he said.
Asked about how to get patients to sign up for portal access, Dr. Garber said that it is important to keep it to patients who really want it. At one Reliant location, he said, staff had a competition to see who could get the most sign-ups, and that site now has the highest percentages of messages that go unread by patients, he said. Using mailed appointment reminders to also let patients know that portals are available—and that they’ll be able to see that office visit’s test results online—can be effective, he said.
“You need to sign people up who understand the reason to use it,” he said, “and not go beyond that.”
Thomas Collins is a freelance medical journalist based in Florida.
