In today’s health care industry, Electronic Medical Records (EMR) with Patient Portals have become the need of the hour for many forward thinking medical practices. EHRs allow health care organizations to improve outcomes by providing proficient medical service, while patient portals typically provide communication services between patients and providers – substantially improving patient satisfaction and the value of services delivered by medical practices.


Key Benefits of Deploying Patient Portal
The advantages of deploying a patient portal are as follows:
  • Simplified administrative and operational processes through instant online access to personal healthcare content
  • Constant access to personal health information empowers patients to be proactive in managing their conditions
  • Improved disease management with automated, condition-specific messages, email reminders and alerts
  • Enhanced patient safety through detailed medication instructions, alerts, warnings and recalls
  • Lab results, radiology reports and procedure information is accessible from anywhere at anytime
These features can be prioritized based on patient needs, resource implications and organizational goals. Online medication renewals, referral requests and basic scheduling require moderate resource commitments from operations, and can easily replace less efficient processes.

A patient portal delivers vital care information directly to the patient’s desktop to help enhance customer satisfaction, eliminate preventable errors along with better care collaboration between doctors and patients.
The real-time collaboration between patients, providers and referring physicians through the patient portal allows clinicians and their patients to share healthcare information in a highly secure, HIPAA compliant environment through the use of SSL and access control patterns whilst, patient access is also typically validated with a user name and password.

Patient portals are also a key tool for physicians to meet “Meaningful Use” requirements and receive federal incentive checks, especially for providing health information to patients. Popular patient portal applications enable patients to register and complete forms online, which can streamline visits to physician clinics and hospitals.

At present, individual health information is located primarily on paper. However, it is predicted that more than 75% of hospitals around the country will be utilizing this technology by the end of 2014. It is also validated through research that that the usage of patient portals will bring huge benefits with regards to patient safety and the secure exchange of healthcare information.