It was my grandfather’s 74th birthday, and the whole family gathered at his place for celebration. I was clicking some pictures on his tablet when a reminder rang regarding a physician’s appointment. I asked him to explain more about how it works, and it all caught me in wonder. He recently had a knee replacement, and his doctor suggested starting some exercises at home daily. Technology has made home in every sector, including healthcare portal development, and patient portals are a classic example of it.
So, instead of every day going to the hospital or calling the doctor at home, the hospital offered him virtual sessions with his physician. This way, he does not have to go to the hospital, and with reminders, he cannot even skip his sessions. That is when I got to know about patient portals. Let us share about it.
What are Patient Portals?
Patient portals encourage better doctor-patient relationships and provide complete transparency to patients over their treatment. It has powerful features that let patients check their prescriptions, report results, schedule an appointment, etc. Mainly, there are two types of patient portals
- A standalone system
- An integrated service
From these, the integrated patient portal software functionality comes as a part of an EHR system, an EMR system, or practice management software.
Patient portals increase patient engagement, enhance their experience, streamline the hospital’s workflow, promote loyalty, etc. To know more about the advantages and features of the patient portal, we shall dig deeper.
Benefits and Features of Patient Portals
Rapid Growth
Many health care organizations have introduced their own patient portals to take one step ahead for making their organizations patient-centric. As a result, over 40% of individuals nationwide use patient portals in the USA, and the Global Patient Portal Market size is expected to be near $5.6 billion by 2025. The reason for these numbers increasing every day is only the security, accessibility, and comfort that patient portals provide to the patients. Thus, with patient portals, you can rapidly attract the loyalty and trust of patients to grow your organization.
Promotes Better Communication
Patients can communicate easily with their doctors. They no longer have to visit hospitals to receive their lab results. They can simply log into their portal with a secure password and access their reports, make a virtual appointment with the doctors, use online payment gateways, etc. The messages or chats with doctors can be saved in the portal for further appointments. The portals also send reminders to the patient for their appointment time to save the doctor’s time and prevent patients from missing their appointments.
Streamlined Workflow
Using a patient portal can help in streamlining the workflow of your office. With the patient portal, your receptionists and nurses do not have to deal with the primary or non-urgent request or questions over phone calls anymore. Because with the portal, you can streamline simple conversations online. This way, you can preserve your organization’s phone lines and valuable office staff’s efforts in more urgent health care requirements.
Plus, the staff taking repetitive requests may lead to misinterpretations of patient issues or needs. Whereas receiving written messages from patients allows the doctor and staff to interpret their situations and requirements precisely and correctly. Additionally, this will boost the staff’s efficiency as they do not have to deal with repetitive tasks anymore. You can have a chatbot on your portal, FAQ sections, etc., to guide your patients through simple queries.
Provides Telemedicine Tools
Telemedicine tools within patient portals lead to more effective patient medications. The in-built software can automatically check for any drug-to-allergy or drug-to-drug interactions based on a patient’s previous reports, diagnosis, and current medications. This way, doctors can fill the prescription with all the precautions. Additionally, the portal saves all the diagnosis reports or prescriptions so that doctors and patients can access it whenever needed.
Data Management and Data Security
Data management and data security are vital parts to take care of in any healthcare organization. Even a minor leak from any records can be a hazardous take. With a patient portal, you do not have to worry about security. You just need to choose a suitable company providing a healthcare portal development, and that is it. The portal will take care of the security.
Portals save login information, payment credentials, reports, chats, everything securely in portals. And talking about data management, patients can easily access all the data saved in their portals, delete the unnecessary ones, starred the important ones, etc. All the editing are possible inpatient portals.
Provides Device Comfort
As we know that providing all device support is so important in the digital world where one cannot carry desktops everywhere or want to use mobile phones for everything. With patient portals, patients can log in to their accounts from laptops, desktops, tablets, and mobile phones. This will give them comfort and even be useful at the time of emergency. This feature leads to more patients using the portals and trusting your organizations.
After talking about benefits and features, we need to know about what to consider while building a patient portal:
Things to Consider While Building A Patient Portal
Before investing in any healthcare portal development, you need to consider a few factors and check for their availability. Below are those factors:
- Justifies its cost
- Enables customization
- Helps in managing patient information
- Ease the communication
- Accurate navigation
- Provides content management access
- Provides complete security
Final Thoughts
It is clear from the above benefits that using patient portal software provides you with several benefits with the help of technology for your healthcare organization. After knowing the benefits and considerations, you might be eager to know about the cost of the patient portal. Well, the cost of patient portal software may vary according to the features you want and the company you choose. Consider which level of training or maintenance the solution needs. Also, make sure it constantly keeps upgrading and answers all the troubleshooting answers.
