Utilizing Telemedicine Tools and Staying Connected

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PATIENT EMPOWERMENT NETWORK

Most health plans, even before this health crisis, would offer an option for you to get a telehealth visit. I hope your doctor is responsive and he/she should be, but in the event that your provider isn't offering telehealth visits, other options exist.

Can you speak to what tools a patient will need to adequately engage with patient portals?

Honora Miller:

Dr. Kvedar:

Patient portals have been around for a long time. However, I would give us a bit of a black eye on making them user-friendly. I don't think we've done a very good job of that. And again, this is a patient empowerment conversation, and I don't know that we've done a very good job of empowering people to interact with us through those tools. That said, all of a sudden now patient portals have become a primary way you're interacting with your healthcare providers, so we're upping our game. It's too bad it takes a crisis but there it is, and I think we'll get much, much better. I often say, every service you consume other than healthcare has a digital front end that has a way of interacting with software to get things done easily. For example, you take a picture of your check and deposit in your bank account with just a few taps on your smartphone. There's millions of examples now, and health care is just getting going in that regard. The patient portal story is really mostly about security, that is to say, it's a very secure electronic environment for you to interact with your healthcare provider.

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