Four Steps to Launching a Successful Patient Portal

Patient portals are full of potential. They have the potential to help patients be more compliant by providing medical records, education, lab results, and secure communication with providers. They have the potential to help improve patient collections with online billpay. They have the potential to reduce phone calls to the practice. They even have the potential to help your practice recruit and retain patients. But all of that potential is entirely dependent on getting your patients to use it.

“I think there are three very good reasons to have a patient portal,” says Daniel Soteldo, Practice Manager at Westgate Skin and Cancer in Austin, Texas. “First, it provides another tool to help manage your accounts receivable more effectively. You can reduce calls into the practice, save time, and collect more by allowing patients to pay online. Second, you provide the consumer-centric, self-service options many patients now want, improving the patient experience. And finally, if you want to participate in CMS incentive programs and be compliant for those, you need a portal that patients can use to access their medical record.”

Soteldo also suggests that there is another potential benefit to using a patient portal for your practice that many don’t consider. “As a business, your human resources and business needs can change over time,” he explains. “By automating and streamlining workflows in areas where you can, you can help reduce the complexity of tasks and simplify the process of training new employees.” He suggests that a patient portal is a good example of this. You can reduce or eliminate some complex tasks by making them automated processes through your portal.

Although some practices report that it is hard to get patients to use their portal, patients say they want a portal. In fact, two out of three people said in a Deloitte survey that they would switch providers to get access to their medical records online.(1)

Successfully launching a patient portal requires more than the flip of switch.

So why do so many practices struggle to get patients to use a portal when they have one? Generally the reason is lack of awareness. One survey showed that 33% of patients did not know if their healthcare provider offered a portal.(2)

Successfully launching a patient portal requires more than the flip of switch. You can’t just turn it on and move to your next project. There must be a complete marketing and communications plan to ensure a high rate of adoption. Soteldo says, “You really need a strategy that makes sense for your practice and your patients to drive adoption of the portal and see the benefits.”

Often practices launch a portal to patients without sufficient training of their own staff. The very first thing you need to do, after your portal is turned on, is train your staff on what it looks like, how it works, what steps are needed to get on the portal, and how to troubleshoot. Ideally, set up mock accounts, and have staff sign up and navigate the portal. Every practice employee should know the ins and outs of your portal and be able to answer patient questions. Role-playing, where one staff is the patient and the other is the staff member, can be a good tool to allow staff to be prepared for different interactions with patients about the portal as well.

“It is really important to have a complete plan for launching your portal that includes an internal launch,” Soteldo says. “Once you complete the internal set-up and training, then you can roll it out to your patients. To do that, you need to really understand your patient population and their preferences.”

Soteldo suggests that it is critical to know whether each patient prefers e-mail, text, mail, or phone communications. Then use their preferred method to reach out. The rollout should really cover a wide range of communication tools, from your Facebook page to face-to-face interactions. It is important not to make assumptions about your patients but to base your understanding on real experience and data.

For example, practices commonly assume that older patients are not as likely to use a portal because they have less experience with technology. This assumption may not be based on facts, however. Several studies have shown that older Americans are more and more likely to be using technology such as smartphones, the Internet, and social media sites like Facebook. In fact, they are one of the fastest growing segments on Facebook.

If you haven’t been asking patients about preferences for communication, such as e-mail or text, now is a good time to start. You can begin asking when people schedule appointments or check in. It’s a great way to start collecting e-mail addresses and cell phone numbers in preparation for being able to communicate in those ways. It is likely your portal or associated tools will give you the ability to communicate with text and e-mail as well as by traditional means.

By asking now, you can begin to get a sense of your patients’ preferences and do a better job of rolling out the portal. The results also may challenge—or support—some of your assumptions. Either way, you will have more data to use to effectively roll out your portal.

Another option is to conduct a short patient survey prior to launching your portal. This serves two purposes. First. asking questions about what communication channel patients prefer, what types of features they would like to see, or how likely they would be to use a portal will help you do a better a job of launching and maximizing use of the portal. Second, this can serve as a preview to your patients of what is to come so they are expecting the rollout when it comes.

Once your staff are well trained and comfortable with the portal, and you have all the data you need about your patients’ communication preferences, you are ready to launch. Your portal rollout should look something like this—depending on what tools you have at your disposal:

1. Announce your new portal through every communication tool you have so that you are hitting each of those patient preferences. It should be on your website, social media channels like Facebook and Twitter, and phone system’s on-hold messaging. Send out an e-mail announcement and a letter with instructions on how to sign up. Add a note to e-mail and text reminders and follow-up surveys. Put it in your newsletter. Have a card or flyer at the front desk you can hand out with instructions on how to sign up.

2. Remind patients about the new portal at every interaction. When someone calls the office, he or she should always be asked, “Have you signed up for our patient portal yet?” Patients should be asked when they check in and check out. Encourage physicians to mention it when they talk about lab results. For example, “We’ll call soon with your results, and you can also see them on our patient portal. Have you signed up yet?”

3. Have a laptop or tablet at the front desk to help people sign up. If patients say they would like to sign up but aren’t sure how, or tried to sign up but couldn’t do it, then a staff member can walk them through it while they are in the office. This is a good way to help those patients who aren’t as tech savvy as others. It can also be good for patients who do not have easy access to a computer or mobile device at home. Practices with a high population of Medicaid patients often ask about this. It also makes sense to remind the patients that they can access a computer at the library or local Internet cafe.

4. Make sure that you have the link to your portal’s online billpay on printed and electronic patient statements. Ninety-three percent of patients say they would pay their bill online if they could. Give them that chance!(3)

Six months to a year of steady promotion should enable you to reach most patients, and then you can scale it back.

With all of this in place, the last important thing to remember is that you need to keep this up for quite some time. Many of your patients only come in once or twice a year. Six months to a year of steady promotion should enable you to reach most patients, and then you can scale it back. People need to hear the same information several times for it to sink in, which is why it is so important to announce your portal everywhere, all the time, and for a long enough period of time.

The portal should become part of the regular experience at the practice and play a role in a larger patient engagement strategy. “A patient portal should really be part of a larger move toward a heads-up medicine approach to patient care,” says Tom Giannulli, MS, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer at Kareo, a medical software platform for independent practices. “Heads-up medicine is when you engage patients both with and in spite of technology. You use the technology where you can to connect more with patients, not less. Helping staff understand how to use technology in a way that engages patients instead of turning them off is an important part of using technology successfully in a practice.”

As patients demand more and more consumer features, vendors are upgrading their solutions to meet the demand. Each time a new feature is added, you have the opportunity to do another push to get people to use the portal. You can do a smaller round of communication to announce new features such as online scheduling on your website, social media, and newsletter or through text and e-mail messages.

When it comes to successfully rolling out a patient portal, slow and steady wins the race. You need to have a consistent message that patients will see and hear more than once. And your entire staff needs to be on board with delivering that message and encouraging patients to use the portal.

If you are successful, you will see the benefits says Soteldo. “Hands down we have seen benefits from our portal,” he adds. “It has absolutely helped us improve patient collections and reduce phone calls into the practice and participate in incentive programs like Meaningful Use. Patients make payments at night and on the weekend, and our biller comes in the next morning and is able to quickly post those payments. Our patients expect a high level of service, including options for easy self-service, and we have been able to provide that with the portal. We see the results of efforts like this in our patient satisfaction surveys.”

The bottom line is that your patients want access to a portal. They just need you to tell them it’s ready and waiting for them and show them how to make the most of it.

References

1. 2011 Survey of Health Care Consumers Global Report: Key Findings, Strategic Implications. Deloitte. http://deloitteblog.co.za/files/healthcare_news/june_2013/US_CHS_2011ConsumerSurveyGlobal_062111.pdf.

2. Irwin K. Patient portal preferences. IndustryView 2014. August 19, 2013. Software Advice. www.softwareadvice.com/medical/industryview/patient-portals-2014/ .

3. Trends in healthcare payments. Fifth annual report: 2014. InstaMed. May 2015. www.instamed.com/trends-in-healthcare-payments-annual-report-2014/.