Patient Portal

Patient Portals: Changing Healthcare Delivery

Learning Team C

HCS/531

02/23/2015

Dr. Tracey Collins

Patient Portals: Changing Healthcare Delivery

The emergences of Electronic Health Records (EHR) lead way to the appearance of patient portals. EHR or Electronic Health Records are a digital or virtual version of the paper charts that primary care physicians and facilities use to keep on patients. EHRs offer real-time record keeping; they contain a patient's medical history, diagnoses, medications, treatment plans, immunization records, and lab and radiology reports. These systems also give the providers access to evidence-based tools to help them make decisions about patient's care or treatment and offers a streamlined workflow. EHRs make health care portable giving providers the ability to share records with other providers in the same facility or even a different facility (What is an electronic health record (EHR), 2013; Benefits of EHRs: Patient Participation, 2014).

Patient Portals

Patient portals use the information captured within the EHR system to provide patient access to the personal health records or their PHRs and facilitates secure email communications between patients and providers. These portals also allow patients to schedule non-acute appointments, make payments, order medication refills, view and possibly print immunization records, lab results, and update contact information just to name a few of the possibilities. All of these things help patients to be more involved in their own healthcare (What is a patient portal?, 2014).

New technological advances have contributed to change the delivery of healthcare by giving providers access to complete and accurate information; as a result patients are receiving better health care, as a result. EHRs have improved the ability to diagnose illnesses and helped to prevent errors improving the patient's overall outcome. A national survey conducted by the National Conference on health statistics...