Changes in healthcare landscape motivating patients

BOSTON--Clinical advancements are happening more quickly than ever before along with increasing regulations and compliance requirements, said O’Neil Britton, MD, chief health information officer for Partners HealthCare, speaking at the Medical Informatics World Conference on April 28.

In the past, healthcare was built around the institution, but now it is focused around the patient. Healthcare used to have payments incentivize more care, but today the system is starting to incentivize better care. There used to be a grudging acceptance of healthcare costs but now there is recognition that we are unable to sustain the cost burden.

All of these changes are starting to motivate patients so patient engagement and satisfaction are “a growing priority,” said Britton. Portals and other mobile tools are one way to achieve those goals. He said Partners’ clinician portal was accessed 130,000 times in the past 7 days and 150,000 over the past 30 days. Its patient portal, however, was accessed 650,000 times over a 7-day period and 1.5 million times over a 30-day period. “We had no idea” the extent of use, he said. The number of downloads of its EHR app “represents a third from the patient perspective for data.”

There are barriers to that thirst, however, Britton said, including a lack of interoperability and low levels of computer competency and health literacy. Privacy and security issues are looming as well, he said, because problems cause patients to “quickly lose their confidence” in the healthcare system.

Although “we are very invested in patient-reported outcomes,” because of the opportunity to drive analytics, Britton said the Partners patient portal doesn’t provide enough information or flexibility to users. The organization is trying to improve the user experience by pinpointing frustrations and finding out what patients are doing with their information. Britton said Partners is aiming for a look and feel that would make it much easier for patients to enter data. “We’re still very much constrained in what we’re offering patients…but we want to create a bidirectional flow of information.”

Britton said Partners is focused on how to “redesign workflows to make this work for everyone.” The organization wants to make it more longitudinal and sell the idea of the importance of patient-reported data so patients will start seeing the benefits. “We’re just scratching the surface” of the possibilities, said Britton.