Enhancing patient engagement with interactive health portals

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Patient engagement is a well-recognized healthcare issue for several reasons – patients often do not get timely information or understand the information shared by their physicians. Many providers still have paper records and maintain records through hard copies, leading to information breakdowns and missed opportunities. When patients interact with healthcare providers, it can often be through outdated methods of communication, such as phone calls, instead of more modern message and video technologies. In many cases, healthcare providers are constrained by outdated workflows that have yet to adopt the incredible capabilities that modern technology can bring to the healthcare setting.

Interactive health portals address these issues by providing patients with convenient access to their health information and a means for active communication with healthcare providers. From their home, patients can access their medical records online, arrange an appointment, or get a reminder; some portals even allow virtual consultation between doctor and patient. Interactive health portals potentially lead to better health outcomes, elevated patient satisfaction, and reduced burden on the health care system.

Why patient engagement matters

Engaged patients may be more likely to ask questions that could improve health outcomes. All of these factors lead to better overall health. The research demonstrates that engaged patients have better outcomes. A review of 50 studies showed that patients engaged in decision-making improve their clinical outcomes by an average of 12 percent. This outcome is expected when patients take ownership in managing their health in the doctor’s office and throughout each day. In particular, engaging patients is associated with greater adherence to therapeutic prescriptions and better health behavior. When patients take an active role in their healthcare decisions, including treatment plans and ongoing care, they often become knowledgeable about their conditions and the steps required to treat or manage them. For example, studies show engaged patients are up to three times more likely to adhere to treatment plans, with corresponding better management of chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension. Engagement also leads to fewer hospital readmissions and fewer complications linked to chronic disease treatments.

The research shows how intimately patient engagement is linked with better outcomes. Patients engaged in their care tend to have better outcomes and lower overall healthcare expenditures, as a recent study in the journal Health Affairs found. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) reported that patient-centered care, which emphasizes engagement, decreases hospital readmissions by 19 percent and emergency department visits by 12 percent. These findings highlight how patient engagement can improve healthcare outcomes for individuals and the performance of groups.

Key features of interactive health portals

Customizable patient dashboards

Patient dashboards, the hallmark of many interactive health portals, allow patients to actively monitor their care by tracking health indicators such as blood pressure, glucose, and weight levels, as well as upcoming doctor appointments and prescribed medication. Monitoring vital health data and appointments through the dashboard, which formats information in an easily accessible way, makes it feel more like a game, helps patients track their improvement over time, and empowers them to take more control over their care. Moreover, engaging in direct messaging with care providers allows patients to maintain an ongoing dialogue with their healthcare team and to seek support and advice when they experience an irregular symptom, thus making the care experience more personalized.

Secure messaging and communication tools

Secure messaging and other communication tools are other essential components of interactive health portals that allow for safe, confidential, and real-time communication between patients and their practitioners – and this satisfies the HIPAA requirements by providing secure channels for patients to access advice, discuss potential symptoms and ask relevant questions without a face-to-face visit required. All these tools enhance the responsibility and usability of healthcare services and possibly ease the ability of some to provide timely and appropriate visits.

Appointment scheduling and reminders

More patients show up for appointments, and clinics become more efficient with the help of custom healthcare software solutions. Typically, patients schedule appointments with their providers by calling and following the provider’s scheduling system. These portals allow patients to book their appointments online so that they do not have to call and be put on hold, which saves them time. Second, the portals allow patients to set reminders to show up for appointments through email or text message reminders, which helps them keep appointments.

Access to medical records and test results

In patients’ interaction with their healthcare team, offering easy access to their medical records, test results, and other health information via an interactive health portal supports them to take ownership of their health. Patients should be able to review their health history, laboratory results, medical conditions, and more, all without having to wait for a discussion to take place in person by a physician or nurse. This makes every healthcare experience more transparent with a greater degree of self-determination as the outcome – patients become more involved in their care as the information they need to make better decisions becomes available to them.

Benefits of implementing interactive health portals

Improved patient satisfaction and loyalty

These interactive health portals enable patients to control their care more, leading to increased satisfaction and loyalty to their providers. Enabling greater access to health information and easy and responsive communications with the provider at their fingertips while providing them with self-care resources and tools that extend the one-on-one visit creates a more engaging and responsive experience where patients feel empowered and better supported. Increased satisfaction leads to patients staying with their providers, a valuable concern given the importance of patient retention in ensuring optimal and sustainable growth for health systems.

Streamlined communication between patients and providers

An example of how communication technologies increase efficiency is through interactive health portals that streamline the patient-provider relationship. These portals not only reduce non-clinical administrative burdens for providers and increase efficiencies in patient care but also free up care team members to focus on improved patient outcomes rather than entering data. Features such as secure messaging allow patients to communicate with their care teams over time instead of making a phone call or scheduling a time-consuming office visit. With features such as appointment scheduling and real-time updates, patients have the information they need available and less frustration in waiting for timely responses to their concerns. Strong communication between patients and providers, including through interactive health portals, simplifies the patient-provider relationship and may lead to better care and more satisfied employees for healthcare organizations.

Enhanced data security and compliance

Security is paramount regarding data in healthcare, both because of the highly sensitive nature of patient information and the regulatory pressures to avoid data breaches and attract penalties from such events. Embedding encryption, user-rights controls, and network security auditing into these portals protects patient data against unauthorized access and breaches. Moreover, compliance with regulations such as HIPAA can be embedded into the design architecture of patient-facing systems, allowing clinicians to comply with such laws and avoid millions of dollars in penalties. Improved data security will engender trust in the system and usher more healthcare consumers to adopt digital health tools.

Developing custom health portals: Best practices

Understanding the needs of your patient population

Developing a custom health portal allows for features to be designed to fit the natural needs of your patient population. This requires an understanding of the demographics and medical and technological preferences that are unique to your patients. With a portal designed to fit the specific needs of your population, better usability and greater relevance will likely result. For example, if you have a patient base with a larger proportion of patients suffering from chronic diseases, features that allow them to manage their long-term disease should be prioritized. On the other hand, create a portal for a younger, tech-savvy population; the main features may lie more in mobile-friendly access and instant communication. Either way, by creating a portal with your patient population in mind, your overall user experience can directly improve. This will ultimately result in better patient outcomes and better patient satisfaction overall.

Ensuring a user-friendly interface

If patients have difficulty using the system, they will not use it. The portal must be designed to be easy to navigate, use, and intuitive. In particular, patients should feel excited to day-to-day use this health portal daily. Unclear design, complicated flows, and hard-to-use portals led to reducing needles being evil (introduction about being hard to use means it is not helpful), and patients would not use the health portal anymore. Therefore, only easy design clairvoyance, integration thought, and realizing functions with playing the best portal become patients’ habits; otherwise, it will become an abandoned issue and be a total failure. Human-(centered-)centered design is a systematic approach to designing products that consider the needs and characteristics of individuals for optimal usability. In the process of the design, some patients would like to join us and give us feedback to learn more about patients’ expectations and using the Health portal experience (such as usability testing, a method used to evaluate a product by testing it on the intended audience to identify any issues), then change the portal design according to these people’s feedback. A user-friendly online health portal should reflect a simple human-centered design and allow patients to find their information, send mail to the doctor, and confirm the doctor’s appointment with just a few clicks, step-by-step. In conclusion, an online health portal would make the relationship between patients and doctors closer. It would be easier to remind and encourage patients to do all medical checkups and adopt this Health portal.

Integrating with existing healthcare systems

Custom health portals become usable, functional, and efficient when integrated with EHR or EMR (electronic health records or electronic medical records) systems. Depending on how the portal is developed and what is integrated, patients and their providers can access and review accurate, real-time information about health, past and present. It’s important for patient-physician communication and for documenting patient care from any provider. Integration and other innovative healthcare technologies, such as telemedicine platforms and lab systems, can offer a complete, centralized care hub inside one patient-facing portal. By working with systems already in place in a healthcare organization rather than fighting against them, the health portal can better contribute to a cohesive and efficient care experience.

The role of custom software development in patient engagement

Custom software development for healthcare is especially well-placed to address these unique challenges of patient engagement with tailored solutions specific to the organization and its patient population. Commercial off-the-shelf software products do not necessarily have adequate features and functionalities to encourage patient engagement; for example, commercially restricted mobile apps may not be widely accessible to all. A custom patient portal tailored to the patient population with a specialized tool for managing chronic conditions, personalized communication features, and easier-to-use interfaces will benefit the elderly with pre-existing medical issues. Furthermore, some patient populations lack access to digital technology and skills to seek engagement on such platforms. Software interventions that acknowledge this will likely increase engagement success.

There are many advantages to working with a specialized healthcare software development company, like Asahi Technologies, when building a custom healthcare application. Its experienced, expert teams bring deep industry knowledge, awareness of regulations that affect your software, and a thorough understanding of the healthcare software development landscape, such as HIPAA compliance and data security, all contributing to efficient and successful work in this space. When your custom healthcare application is built by a company with a track record in this specific domain, you benefit from having a voice and understanding of the users that are compelling healthcare providers to offer frictionless and human experiences to attract more patients.

Conclusion

To sum up, interactive health portals are an important asset for patients to help with participation in medical affairs, where patients can easily access the information received from providers to know about their health conditions and facilitate communication with healthcare providers. Allowing patients to be empowered with their private information on their health records and share them with providers anytime through the internet is not only helping to improve patient satisfaction but also their health care outcomes. The time has come to embrace this technological tool for better healthcare.