Segment 5 - An Ideal Patient Portal

"What does a good patient portal look like so that these technologies and this care coordination can be accessible to a broad set of constituencies?" Joseph Alvarnas, MD, asked the panelists. "Does anybody do this well?"

According to Rebekka Schear, MIA, while a lot of the existing platforms are technically sound, what they are missing are a more holistic approach to patient care. "If you look at a lot of what Epic offers, you've got the ability to in many cases send an e-mail to your provider. You've got a patient profile. Your information is constantly updated. You can go in and access and update it. Your medication history is on there. You can send a confidential or private message and things like that," she said.

"But I think what we're missing is that holistic patient perspective. What I think from my perspective what we've literally done is just taken the very 2-dimensional nature of a patient and then sort of projected it into this digital dimension," she added. Schear would like to see health information platforms reflect the values of the patient.

Michael Kolodziej, MD, added that the patient portals "were note really built to be useful to the patient. That wasn't the intention. The intention was to meet meaningful use criteria. I think that perspective is in the process of change."