Patient Engagement: The Importance of athenahealth’s Patient Portal
Practices utilizing athenaOne vary widely in size and specialty. They partner with payers using a mixture of reimbursement models and employ a diverse range of providers and staff with varying licensures. Some render services via telehealth, while others offer in-person visits.
Regardless of a practice's framework, the central focus and primary motivation for showing up to work each day is the patient. No one enters healthcare solely to enhance the experience for providers and billers—while that might be a secondary goal, the primary intent behind simplifying provider and revenue cycle workflows is to improve our complex healthcare system.
Despite the shared goal of improving our fragmented system for patients, Ignite consultants frequently observe that the patient experience is not prioritized during an EMR implementation. At the heart of the patient experience is the patient portal. The full benefits of an EMR can only be realized when paired with a patient portal.
Benefits of a Patient Portal:
Enhance Patient Engagement:
Empower patients to play an active role in their healthcare.
Better Health Outcomes:
When patients have easy access to medical notes and results, they can better adhere to treatment plans and track progress.
Improve Communication and Increase Productivity:
Convenience: Reduce time spent on hold and playing phone tag. Patients can utilize the portal at their convenience, even outside of normal business hours.
Streamline: Eliminate the need for manual outreach for non-urgent communications, such as result follow-ups, appointment reminders, and patient payment reminders.
Trackability: Conversations are logged, removing the guesswork from phone notes that are not a direct recount of a conversation with a patient.
Meet Healthcare Regulations:
Successfully attest for MIPS Promoting Interoperability (PI) Measure: Provide patients electronic access to their health information.
Comply with the Cures Act Final Rule.
Long-Term Cost Savings:
Reduce the printing of paper records, results, and bills.
Minimize communication that requires postage.
Satisfied patients lead to better retention and increased revenue.
Timing is Everything:
It is crucial to roll out the patient portal when you launch athenaOne rather than waiting until after going live. This may require a greater investment of time and resources for design, marketing, and training during the implementation, but it is worth it in the long term. AthenaOne is designed to work in tandem with the portal, and launching both simultaneously allows a practice to use the platform to its full potential. Providers, staff, and patients will all benefit from adopting scalable and sustainable workflows early on.
Options to Consider When Implementing the athena Portal:
Web Scheduling:
Decide if patients should be able to schedule directly with your practice or only request a new appointment.
Messaging:
Enable messages to route to providers or staff depending on task assignment overrides and providers' ability to respond in a timely fashion.
Activate messages for several types or categories, including:
Appointments and scheduling
Billing and payments
Insurance
Medical questions
Prescriptions and refills
Review Lab and Imaging Results:
Enable auto-publishing of normal results.
Require additional review by the practice before granting patients access.
Allow patients to access Patient Care Summaries and Healthwise Educational Material from historical visits.
Capture patient acknowledgments and consents through Clinical Paper Forms enabled with digital signatures.
Enable patients to review statements and make electronic payments on outstanding balances.
Web vs. Mobile Based:
AthenaPatient is athena’s native smartphone app equivalent to the patient portal. It is supported on both iOS and Android devices and further promotes easy access to a patient’s healthcare information. However, AthenaPatient does not support all patient portal web-based features at this time. For instance, letters can only be accessed from the full web-based portal.
Recent Features and Updates for athena’s Portal:
Spring 2024:
Lab Result Auto-Publishing Exceptions: Enable practice-specific rule-based exceptions for auto-publishing results to the patient portal.
Summer 2024:
Non-Patient Portal Self-Registration: Provide a secure and easy way for family members and healthcare proxies to create a portal account to access a patient’s information.
Eliminate "Security Question" as an option for Patient Portal password resets.
Access athena's full Product Roadmap through their Success Community.
Reach out to Ignite’s team of specialized athena consultants if you’d like additional assistance implementing or optimizing your practice’s use of the athena portal.
