Boston, MA — For the last few years, patient portals have been driving a sweeping change in the way patients interact with their health records and communicate with their providers. You may have seen recent articles like this one from MM&M (http://www.mmm-online.com/campaigns/ehrs-patient-portals-and-the-four-ps/article/450646/), which have sought to understand how portal use can be improved and what role pharma might have within them.
Recently, Drs. Isaac Kohane and Kenneth Mandl of Boston Children’s Hospital wrote a widely circulated piece to encourage a new way of thinking about health portal technology. They want these domains to be a place where patients can access all of their health data, anytime and anywhere, with the ability to fill it in or provide more when they’d like. The idea is to convert the portal into a two-way conversation that is more patient-controlled, so they “effectively become a health information exchange of one.”
Why this matters:
The shift that Kohane and Mandl describe makes sense with the trend towards patients being increasingly engaged with their own personal health data. However, if this trend catches on and we begin to see more hospitals utilize platforms like OpenNote (which Mt. Sinai adopted just last week), EHRs and their loci of control may become critical platforms for pharma to provide patient communications, as well.
Read more here: http://mobihealthnews.com/content/harvard-docs-time-right-patient-centered-health-repositories-not-portals
