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Due to the need for better healthcare delivery, there has been increased technology use for more effective and efficient care. A patient portal is an online website that provides 24 hours access to patient information, including discharge summaries, allergies, lab results, immunizations, and recent doctor visits (Dendere, Slade, Burton-Jones, Sullivan, Staib, & Janda, 2019). It facilitates two-way communication between healthcare providers and patients based on electronic health records. It lets patients communicate directly to healthcare providers and vice versa. They can be accessed anywhere using a secure username and password as long as there is an internet connection (Dendere et al., 2019). Portals entitle patients to manage their health records, especially those with chronic diseases. Up to 2020, 59% of Americans had been offered their patient portals, a 17% increase from 2014 (Casillas, Abhat, Mahajan, Moreno, Brown, Simmons, & Szilagyi, 2020). Due to the financial incentives given by the US government to transform healthcare systems, many healthcare facilities have adopted patient portals. This has significantly improved the care for minority groups such as low-income, patients of color, and those with limited English proficiency.
Physicians and patients are the main users of patient portals in the healthcare system. The physicians utilize them to update their lab results, communicate with patients, retrieve information about the patient, and schedule appointments (Casillas et al., 2020). On the other hand, patients use portals to update their insurance covers, retrieve lab results, communicate with their healthcare providers, pay bills, ask for prescription refills, and check their health status.
Portals improve the quality in various ways; first, they provide better patient communication. Patients use the portal to engage directly with their physicians, a task that would previously require lengthy phone calls or even visiting the healthcare facility (Nost, Faxvaag, & Steinsbekk, 2021). The portal has increased efficiency in how patients communicate with their healthcare providers because they can request referrals, appointments, and prescription refills using the portal. The staff can simply respond to patient needs and focus more on patients with more urgent care needs—making patient communication easier facilitates higher compliance to prescriptions, leading to better health outcomes.
These portals also streamline administrative tasks and patient registration. Using the patient portal enables the patients to fill out registration forms prior to the visit, making the registration process very convenient and efficient (Dendere et al., 2019). The administrative staff can ask for any clarifications they may require from the patient prior to the visit and get answered. It ensures that patients are comfortable with the administrative part by the time they arrive at the healthcare facility. This leads to better care delivery, saves on the cost of printing physical documents, and ensures efficiency in the patient registration process.
They also assist in optimizing medical office workflow whereby some of the tasks that patients would need to have staff to help them, patients complete electronically. The time that patients have to wait for their lab results, schedule appointments, answer referral questions, and document patient refill needs are saved because the healthcare providers can directly upload them to their portals (Antonio, Petrovskaya, & Lau, 2019). This makes the healthcare provider’s life easier because the pressure mounts doing lab analysis while the patients are outside waiting for the results decreases. Giving healthcare providers enough time to analyze the results ensures that they also provide quality and accurate results, leading to better treatment.
Patient portals have improved the quality of outcome in healthcare facilities because it helps to have a better patient-physician relationship. Portals validate that patients to connect with a physician for 24 hours as long as they have an internet connection (Dendere et al., 2019). This makes them engage the healthcare providers by asking them questions and reviewing their medication. For instance, if a prescription does not work as expected or leads to other allergic reactions, the patient can directly consult the doctor using the patient portal and get advice on the way forward. This shows that healthcare providers are more connected to the patients through the patient portal, leading to quick, responsive healthcare solutions and improving the quality of care.
Portals provide more focus on patient care in US healthcare facilities. They enable a convenient and efficient way of electronically sharing patient information, which has eased the transfer process (Casillas et al., 2020). Therefore, instead of healthcare professionals thinking of getting patient records to other healthcare professionals, they can concentrate on delivering better healthcare because the process can be done electronically. It can be through sending a link to the patient’s portal to the other healthcare provider and can access all patient information with just a click of a button (Nost et al., 2021). On the one hand, healthcare professionals can get more time to focus on healthcare and improve the quality of care in hospitals. On the other hand, the patient portal enables the transfer of accurate and up-to-date information to the other physician. Since the data is shared electronically, healthcare providers can send accurate information, which helps deliver quality health care.
Patient portals have become very useful in ensuring that patient information is kept in a single online platform. They have led to increased preventive medicine, disease awareness, more medical adherence, and decreased hospital visits. It enables 24-hour retrieval of patient information which makes it a convenient method of accessing patient information. More advancements such as the use of cloud services in patient portals would ensure more efficient communication, unrestricted electronic access, and improved health outcomes.
References
Antonio, M. G., Petrovskaya, O., & Lau, F. (2019). Is research on patient portals attuned to health equity? A scoping review. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 26(8–9), 871–883. Web.
Casillas, A., Abhat, A., Mahajan, A., Moreno, G., Brown, A. F., Simmons, S., & Szilagyi, P. (2020). Portals of Change: How patient Portals will ultimately work for safety net populations. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 22(10), Web.
Dendere, R., Slade, C., Burton-Jones, A., Sullivan, C., Staib, A., & Janda, M. (2019). Patient portals facilitating engagement with inpatient electronic medical records: A systematic review. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 21(4). Web.
Nost, T. H., Faxvaag, A., & Steinsbekk, A. (2021). Participants’ views and experiences from setting up a shared patient portal for primary and specialist health services- a qualitative study. BMC Health Services Research, 21(1). Web.
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