Patient Portal

As we further move along in our EMR development in our practice we are increasingly seeing the benefits of using a "Patient Portal" to allow our patients the ability, in a HIPPA compliant way, to access some of our services via the internet. NextGen, our EMR partner, has a NextMD product that Charles Kitzman and I have looked at and conducted a webex on. It looks very promising despite the fact that according to NextGen, while they have several installations in private practices, they don't have any in a CHC - so here we go again trying something completely new! We will likely just add a handful of licenses and focus on testing to make sure that the system is well intergrated inour EMR/EPM and that it has sufficent controls and security capacityl to give us and the patients confidence that it can be relied upon. This past week we have been doing an extensive patient survey to see how many of our patients have access to the internet (early results show 80%) and how many would be willing to communicate using email or through other web features (again, early results show 50%). Our thinking right now is to use the portal to allow people to request appointments and medication refill requests. There may opportunity to think about linking it to teaching videos and other type of education materials also allowing us to do broadcaste notices of changes to our policies, our medical staff and even allowing patients to fill out forms to send in to us electronically. Patients who are intersted would be given a PIN to allow them to enter through the portal to their personal mailbox if you will. We may be also able to share information like lab and other diagnostic results, for example. I am personally very excited by the possibilities and look forward to trialing this over the coming months.