Are patient portals a valuable tool or time waster?

Patient portals were intended to streamline and improve patient care. But like many technology innovations, portals have suffered from the combination of shaky initial product rollouts and user error from a population not totally sold on the concept.
The use of a patient portal requires workflow changes in a physician practice, and many doctors feel it is unfair that they must rely on the patient to log in and send a secure message to meet regulatory requirements.
The moment the patient walks out the door, physicians lose control over whether he or she uses the portal. It has been a huge obstacle for practices to meet the stage 2 requirements of the Meaningful Use program, and led to vociferous complaints about the planned stage 3 rules  prior to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announcing the end of meaningful use as it exists today.

 

Tips for getting past technology glitches

“I have given up on the portal and qualifying for Meaningful Use,” says Timothy Leigh Rodgers, MD, a solo internist in Santa Barbara, California. “I think it is nice to have if people want to use it, but if they don’t, I don’t think I should be penalized for it.”
Rodgers has struggled to persuade his patients to use the portal for scheduling appointments or reviewing lab results. Two-thirds of his patients are older than 65, and he says they just don’t want to use the portal. Only one patient uses it regularly.
Patients reported unresponsive staff (34%) and confusing portal interfaces (33%) as the most irksome issues with portals, according to a 2014 survey of 1,540 U.S. patients by the consulting firm Software Advice. Thirty-three percent of patients were unsure if they even had access to a portal.
Physicians and staff that are seen as unresponsive damage the relationship, says Zachary Landman, MD, senior institute associate at the Harvard Business School Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Previously, he was chief medical officer at DoctorBase, a consulting firm specializing in patient communications.

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