The Benefits of Specialty Specific Patient Portals for Your Practice

For any practice large or small, it is highly beneficial to have a specialty specific patient portal that provides customized features and patient access. Specialty specific portals engage patients within their own healthcare needs, helping them to make informed decisions, empowering them, and helping to improve the overall patient experience.

Time-Saving

Specialty specific patient portals save you time by providing document templates such as self assessment forms which patients can fill in via their personalized patient portal. Specialty specific forms can include, for example, chief complaint, history of present illness, family history, medical history, social history, current medications, and surgical history forms. Each form prompts the patient to answer a series of questions specific to that specialty.  Their answers will then automatically fill a patient visit note that the physician can use during the appointment. Not only does this allow the physician to save time on lengthy written notes during the appointment, but it also allows the physician to avoid preliminary questions with the patient; helping them to see more patients and increase overall revenue.  

Specialty specific patient portals can also save physicians and patients time by providing the patients with the ability to request a refill.  This can be a huge time saver for physicians, eliminating the need for multiple phone calls between physicians, patients, and pharmacies.

Specific Patient Educational Resources

A patient portal allows patients to have access to shared healthcare and personal records kept by your practice. They can update and add to their records with new data at their own convenience. This is a great resource for patients, allowing them to participate in their own healthcare.

Patients are also increasingly interested in their own conditions and using resources such as the internet to conduct research. By having specialty specific patient portals, you can provide you patients with credible resources so that they can read up on specific conditions and become educated about their conditions.

Patient Empowerment

Providing patients with access to specific educational resources, not only allows them to become more informed about their conditions, but it also gives them comprehensive information which can help them feel more involved. Patients may be encouraged to discuss their condition with you, to learn more, and to become more involved and invested in their healthcare plan.

A specialty specific patient portal will also give your patients the resources they need to make changes to their informational records, request appointments, request prescription refills, and contact you when they have a question.  Creating an easy access location for these features not only empowers patients to become an integral part of their health care, but it also allows you to provide a better patient experience.

Ease of Appointment Scheduling

Specialty specific patient portals provide effective facilities for patients to request appointments with physicians relevant to their own condition. This helps to simplify the process and helps to improve the overall patient experience. Patient portals such as those from 1st Providers Choice also make it simple for the patient to see past and future appointments, which can significantly help to reduce no-show rates for your practice.

Improved Communication

Through the portal, your patients can communicate directly with you by using the messaging features. Many patients find they have questions following a visit to their physician, or feel that their office visit was too brief to discuss all that they needed to. The messaging functionality provides patients with a simple way to communicate and build a better relationship with you. Through easier contact, patients feel more satisfied with their experience, which can lead to patient referrals.

Personalized Patient Experience

Specialty specific patient portals allow you to personalize the information your patients will see. You have control over what information they view, for example, a Mental Health patient portal may look very different to an Urgent Care patient portal. The Mental Health patient portal can be tailored to include a number of self-assessment forms that can help the mental health professional gather a large amount of information prior to the patient’s appointment. This helps the providers gain a better understanding of the patient and saves time asking and documenting these questions during their appointment. On the other hand, the Urgent Care patient portal will is more simplistic, allowing patients to quickly access key information.

Specialty specific tools are available at your disposal to adapt to patient requirements, allowing patients to access a range of different data points and results, viewing physician notes and health summaries.

For more information on how specialty specific patient portals can help to benefit your practice and improve the patient experience contact us online or call us at 480-782-1116.

Resources:

https://www.healthit.gov/providers-professionals/faqs/what-patient-portal