Today, to access any healthcare services, patients must make an appointment with their healthcare provider, wait for that appointment to get scheduled, then continue to wait for referrals to or from other healthcare providers.

The whole process is disintegrated, slow, opaque, and burdened with risk of errors. Now is the time for technology to disrupt the industry and address these challenges allowing patients to quickly reach providers and receive the right care, at their convenience.

Improving patient access to the right

A better digital front-end empowers patients to interact with their healthcare system effectively and efficiently at a time and place convenient to them. It provides patients with access to all the tools needed to manage their own healthcare, as well as their dependents’ health and wellbeing, from their own location, while seamlessly guiding them through their health journey.

Empowering patients with this type of access to digital services in healthcare promises to be as transformative as digital access in other industries saving time, money, and frustration.

Registering on a patient portal software

Many health systems commonly use physical signatures and IDs before giving access to healthcare. But with today’s technology, a patient may pre-register themselves through a secure portal. This allows them to book appointments with a single click, review test results, order prescriptions, and securely engage with a medical professional in the chat-box outside the healthcare setting.

This option allows the patient choices to access their health care and gives the healthcare system providers a consistent record of information and communications with the patient. Choices and ownership for the patient equal a better experience.

How COVID-19 escalated the need to address patient challenges to access

Because of the global COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare systems had to escalate investment in technology to deliver virtual access to high-quality care in new ways.

The pandemic acted as a catalyst in the transformation of healthcare access and now offers patients’ numerous ways of digital interaction. Technologies such as remote patient monitoring and telemedicine solutions were universally instituted, and now drive the change that patients have long desired. For example, with virtual care platforms and appointment booking through Electronic Health Record (EHR), patients can easily, efficiently, and effectively interact with their healthcare providers. They can also securely share their health-related information.

By putting patients at the center of the healthcare delivery system and empowering them to navigate through disjointed, complex healthcare systems, digital front-end solutions promise to address some of the challenges faced by today’s patients and healthcare organizations.

iPatientCare has a full suite of innovative healthcare products and value-added services that help physician offices and rural health clinics in improving the health of their patients, enhancing patient care through technology, and reducing costs of care delivery.

The burden of ensuring good health outcomes and avoiding risk in the VBC model, falls heavily on the healthcare system. It is important to meaningfully engage patients and their family members in achieving their own health goals to help alleviate that burden.

There are many challenges behind achieving patient engagement and improving risk management strategies in your healthcare practice. Barriers to successful patient engagement can arise from both patients and physicians.

Barriers on the Patient Side

Effective healthcare requires clear communication and understanding between a patient and their care team. This empowers a patient to take responsibility for their own wellbeing. Therefore, it’s imperative that the patient understands the medical information that is being provided to them. Some patients prefer a high-level overview of their diagnosis while others may request a much more detailed explanation of their diagnosis and treatment plan. In both instances several factors should be kept top of mind when physicians interact with their patients.

• Patient’s cultural background: They may not feel comfortable asking medical questions or advice.
• Patient’s education level: A lower level of education may hinder patients from understanding medical information, processes, or treatment options.
• Cost consideration: High medical costs may prevent patients from seeking appropriate treatment.
• Patient’s motivation: Some patients may lack the motivation to take the necessary steps to improve their health.

Barriers on the Physician Side

Physicians face their own set of challenges in the processes of encouraging patient engagement.

• Lack of modern technology: Patient engagement technology is a recent concept in healthcare. Many physicians have not yet invested in a technology that provides a way for patients to keep in constant communication with their care team. The Patient Engagement platform offered by iPatientCare effectively addresses this lack of communication between physicians and patients.
• Lack of training: Without proper training of new online tools, physicians can begin to feel overwhelmed. Investing in training will enable practices to use the platforms to their full potential.
• Lack of time: Physicians often lack sufficient time to allocate more than 10 or 15 minutes to each patient.
• Lack of patient feedback: The most effective way to evaluate your organization’s patient engagement success is to ask your patients for their feedback. Physicians may feel they have provided appropriate medical education, while the patient is left feeling overwhelmed or unfit to take the first steps to involvement in their own healthcare. Without asking your patient’s what they think, miscommunication may become commonplace.

Strategies to Improve Patient Engagement

• Maintain patient-provider relationships with frequent and clear communication. Encourage patients to be well informed and involved in improving and maintaining their health.
• Expand patient engagement with access to user-friendly patient portals, where they can view their updated health information and submit questions to their physician.
• Implement a shared decision-making process between patients and providers. This helps establish trust with your patients and makes them feel that their needs and preferences are understood.
• Utilize visual aids like diagrams and videos, that help clarify healthcare decisions to the patient. Provide patients and their family members with appropriate informational materials and literature about treatment options and outcomes, so they have a more clear understanding of the care they are receiving.
• Provide patients with peer support when they are facing major health challenges, particularly when they are diagnosed with a life-altering illness.

Interactions between patients and providers across the continuum of care contribute to patient experience and influence a patient’s willingness and ability to engage with the healthcare system. Innovations in healthcare delivery and technology have allowed clinicians to enhance delivery and access to health services and information. However, the evolution to a more patient-centered system is not a simple task. Physicians will be expected to play a central role in assuring coordination of care across the continuum.

iPatientCare is a full suite of innovative healthcare products and value-added services that help you improve the health of your patients by enhancing patient care through care management, coordination, analytics, and reducing the costs of care delivery.

Fill the form to get free consultation with our experts now.

Learn about five ways that can help you attract new patients and keep them returning to your practice to receive care.

1. Invest in modern tools for patient engagement

Increase your practice’s visibility and accessibility with your patients. Today, patients are utilizing mobile health technologies and other rapidly evolving wireless technologies to communicate with their healthcare providers. As such, attracting new patients and retaining them starts with deploying the right tools at your practice. Mobile technology will help you keep your patients actively engaged in their own health, which will improve their overall experience of healthcare.

Here are a few Patient Engagement tools that may act as a catalyst to engage greater patient loyalty, causing patients to join and remain within your health system.

• Patient portal software facilitates secure remote communication with your patients. This technology also enables your patients to access their health information whenever they need to, empowering them to take responsibility of their own health. With a user-friendly and personalized interface, patients can update health-related activities such as demographics, personal health records, lab results, refilling prescriptions, scheduling appointments, and sending secure messages to their care team.
• Mobile health applications,such as patient-centric mHealth tools, can help you contact your patients on their smartphones even when they are not logged in to their patient portal, resulting in increased patient engagement.

2. Increase practice safety

During challenging times like COVID-19, patients are increasingly likely to look for virtual healthcare options. Offering alternate care options that are safe and convenient for your patients has become vital.

• Virtual health has become common practice throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Patients have come to expect it as a standard option they can utilize. If you can implement a sustainable Telehealth platform, it will give your practice a competitive advantage. Recent advances in Telemedicine are making remote consultations and diagnosis easier and more convenient for both patients and providers. It has minimized safety risks and improved health monitoring, timeliness, and communications within the healthcare system. Telemedicine can additionally include remote non-clinical services, such as training, administrative meetings, and continuing medical education.

3. Seek feedback from your patients

If patients are dissatisfied with their visit, there’s a good chance they’ll shop around to find a new provider. Sending patient satisfaction surveys after every visit is a great way to gain valuable feedback. It helps your practice define the scope of improvement in your care delivery methods. Gathering and implementing patient feedback is a great strategy for improving patient retention.

4. Focus on quality of care improvement

Quality improvement within healthcare is a systematic approach to monitor, access, and improve the standards of quality. It directly effects your service delivery approach, level of patient satisfaction, efficiency, and outcomes. Improving quality and performance in your practice can enable you to provide reliable, cost-effective, and sustained healthcare outcomes for your patients.

5. Educate and inform your patients

Start engaging with your patients outside the walls of your practice by launching a robust engagement strategy. Build a strong online presence, where you can provide education and information on topics that are important to your patients. This will additionally showcase your expertise and demonstrate how much you value your patients in a competitive marketplace. A strong online presence is beneficial for both potential and returning patients.

Preserving your existing patient base is just as important as reaching new patients. Implement healthcare technology that emphasizes both.

iPatientCare is a full suite of innovative healthcare products and value-added services that help you improve the health of your patients by enhancing patient care through care management, coordination, analytics, and reducing the costs of care delivery.

The new regulations from the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT (ONC) aim to boost health information exchange, give patients more access to their health data, specifically on their smartphone. It also asks to implement new criteria for EHRs to make all patient data available through application programming interfaces (APIs), which will allow providers and patients to have access to health information. However not all EHRs are equipped with the same capabilities. Some providers may use advanced EHR with the latest features and some may use them just to ease the regular workload. Therefore, patients with valuable access get the whole juice and others are still on the other side of health equality.

To fix this issue, Patient portal software and mobile health applications are two features that the ONC rule highlights, and both give valuable patient access to every individual in the system.

Patient Portals are an effective platform that has been shown to improve patient engagement across the healthcare system. The majority of hospitals, clinics, and other medical practices use patient portals to serve a variety of functions such as login and access personal medical information, request medication refills, receive lab results, email physicians, make payments, and schedule appointments.

Here are a few benefits of utilizing a simplified and optimized patient portal software.

• Reduces frequency of missing appointments

One of the most significant benefits of patient portals is that they can drastically reduce patient’s efforts to get or schedule an appointment. Gone are those days of holding your breath in overloaded waiting rooms before the receptionist who answers the calls and schedule the tedious appointments. With the help of a patient portal software, patients can review schedules and book appointments with the click of a mouse or a touch on the screen. Not just an appointment, patient portals come equipped with the ability to send patients email reminders about upcoming appointments. The patients also appreciate the ability to more easily schedule and book appointments from anywhere and anytime.

• Improves patient engagement 

Patient portals can become the extension to which patients can get involved to manage their health proactively. This is because the patient portal allows them to stay more informed with their demographics, review personal health records (PHR), view lab results and education material, request prescription refills and appointments/referrals, and send secure messages related to clinical questions.

• More efficient with personalized touch

Patient portals can be used as a more efficient means of completing several daily administrative tasks that typically require several staff members. Providers can also customize their portal with personalized brandings, and value system. Providers have the complete control of its design, color scheme, and how it would appear to their patients.

• Improved communication 

Many patients often feel that in-person physician visits are too brief and non-conducive. With the help of patient portals, patient-physician relationships can be strengthened through more frequent contact. Portals allows patients to email or instant message doctors about small concerns that would otherwise necessitate an often costly in-person visit. Through easier and more frequent contact, patients will likely feel more satisfied with their physician and overall care, leading to better outcomes in the long run.

• Patient-centric mobile applications

Providers can ask patients to download free mobile applications to communicate securely and remain actively involved in the management of their health. The notifications are delivered to their smart-phones even when they are not logged in, which results in increased patient engagement. This patient engagement technology act as a catalyst to go beyond the meaningful use core measures related to patient engagement, otherwise difficult to achieve.

Patient portals could narrow down the gap in health disparities among the most vulnerable patients, patients with low access to health facilities, who are much likely to fall under the disparities gap when compared with patients and those who were more health literate. Patient Portal provides equal opportunity to easily engage with doctor and ask questions about health concerns or medications, or to quickly refill prescriptions and get lab results.

iPatientCare Patient Portal Software facilitates providers to stay connected to patients securely and empower them to take charge of their health. If you are also looking to enhance your patient engagement, then you must jump in – to schedule a demo for iPatientCare’s patient engagement solutions.

In addition to equipping clients, iPatientCare had also taken steps to protect the workforces from infection by implementing work-at-home policies, so that the clients don’t have to suffer in this crisis.

Here’s how armor setup looks like. 

Integrated virtual care –

Virtual care adds a layer of safety for providers. Using iPatientCare’s virtual care, they don’t have to endanger themselves or other patients directly to coronavirus. Integrated virtual healthcare solutions enable providers to identify and treat patients without requiring them to come to a medical facility. miPatientCare is designed to provide “anywhere anytime” access to a patient’s clinical records, access changes to the clinical summary, lab reports, refill requests and many more via mobile or tablet applications. It also allows providers to view and schedule appointments and tasks from patients.

Telemedicine and Remote Patient Monitoring –

Telemedicine and Remote Patient Monitoring has become a key technology for doctors to continue to work with and treat patients from a distance. iPatientCare’s telemedicine and patient monitoring platform facilitates providers to have multi-participant video calls, capturing diagnostics, medication adherence, and expansion of unified longitudinal patient records remotely and perpetually by integrating diagnostic devices, wearables, and mobile devices.

Related Article: Telehealth as a ‘Lifeline’ in the midst of Coronavirus Outbreak

iPatientCare’s telemedicine does not require local installations or browser plugins, its advanced collaboration tools with clinical documentation and interoperability capabilities for multi-participant makes it valuable in the time of this crisis.

Interoperability through Health Information Exchange

In the time of crisis, the speed of health information exchange between providers definitely needs to be better to curb the speed of infection spreading among the patients. iPatientCare interoperability through Health Information Exchange (HIE) provides a framework for disparate clinical systems to interact with each other and building a collaborative portal that facilitates a holistic view of a patient’s medical record captured at various care settings, integrated with health systems, and as updated by the patients. Providers value iPatientCare’s HIE because it allows provider-to-provider referrals and consults for delivering seamless care across inpatient and outpatient settings. Amidst this pandemic, HIE helps in reporting patient demographics, medical history, vitals, labs/tests, diagnosis, procedures, medications, immunizations, isolations, etc. across the healthcare system.

Patient Portal to handle questions and secure messaging

The corona virus crisis stretches material and people resources to their limits. Providers can use the patient portal to gain efficiencies and reduce some of the workload through automation. Patient’s self-help capabilities are critically important, and therefore patient portals are playing an important role to help manage the tremendous demand of care during this crisis.

iPatientCare’s patient portal integrates with EHR, and gives unprecedented access to personalized communication, content, and care management. Providers can also personalize the portal with their branding and value system. With the help of patient portals, providers can maximize the use of virtual healthcare channels – especially when health services are under increasing pressure.

New cases of the coronavirus continue to emerge across the globe. iPatientCare requests providers and facility administrators not to take risk when caring for coronavirus patients. Using technology is the need of the hour as it’s the safest way to care and stay uninfected.

iPatientCare has an important responsibility to help providers, associates and clients to stay safe at the workplace. We also assure them about workforce support, community support and client support.

The practices work with multiple insurance companies and hundreds of patients. Thus, trying to do the claims on its own, increases administrative work and cost. It also gives rise to unfinished claims and you miss out on the potential savings and income. About 20-30 percent of practices lose their income due to incorrect billing. To avoid these mishaps, it is best to give this responsibility to a reputed RCM vendor. An RCM vendor should be flexible and have the ability to scale to your practice and grow with you as your business matures. Take advantage of RCM and improve your practice’s efficiency as most aspects of RCM are automated. This helps the providers a great deal to manage operations and workflow.

Administrative transactions range from claim submissions to eligibility verification to claim status inquiries. Approximately, 95% of the providers send the claims electronically. Health plans are responsible, in part for the increasing adaption rate because they occasionally offer incentives to high-volume providers or enforce electronic submission requirements. This automated processing also helps decrease coding mistakes.

In this manner, your RCM vendor should recognize and understand the processes that make each of your payors unique and have the infrastructure to manage the workflow for each one.

Automate transactions – the claims process gives physicians the opportunity to save time and reallocates it to other areas of the practice. The common transactions which can be handled quickly and efficiently through an RCM vendor are:

• Claim submission
• Claim status inquiry
• Claim payment
• Claim remittance advice
• Claim attachments
• Prior authorization
• Eligibility and benefit verification

A perfect RCM program maintains and enhances customer relationships by improving patient financial services. This is done by giving the patient an understandable statement that addresses the cost of services delivered. This ensures that your customers understand the treatments they have received, and the associated costs incurred. This way a long-term relationship with your patients is ensured.

After the receipt of the statement, the provider should address the ways patients can pay, ensuring it is hassle-free. Patients can pay by credit card, cash, or check when in the doctor’s practice and at home, they can pay online through ‘patient portal’ securely.

Outsource the Process

The world of the providers is more complex than it was earlier. Payor contracts are more complicated, payments are frequently lower and time constraints continue to grow. There is less time and fewer resources. Automation of activities can enable the business to improve performance. iPatientCare’s RCM responded to these issues by becoming a full suite of products for optimal results, as a fully-integrated program designed to help ensure the best outcomes for your practice and patients.

Using RCM tools helps you to spend more time with patients, increasing your practice’s productivity and income. It also helps to manage the other challenges better so that your practice can flourish successfully.

All clinicians must remember respecting patients, having clear communication, providing availability of appointments, and putting the patient at the center of the care team are some of the important tactics. Sometimes when the clinicians see their patients only once or twice a year then the provider may need to deploy different relationship-building techniques than their peers or competitors.

Whereas in Orthopedics, providers tend to turn to an integrated network of mHealth apps and remote monitoring tools to remain in contact with their patients.  They also lean on this technology to allow the provider to detect patient recovery progress. The patient portal is a little too static for a risk-based model.  In a primary care situation, it is more about monitoring long-term or chronic conditions like diabetes or cancer.

Connected health tools such as secured smartphone messaging technologies assist the providers to manage changes in a patient’s care plan.  A set of health tools, such as securing smartphone messaging technologies – will help providers manage changes in a patient’s care plan efficiently.

Sending Secure Messages by Patients to the Providers allows them to send healthcare requests to the physician.  The physician can then deliver diagnostic results, preventive care advice, and other healthcare information securely to their patients.  In addition to this, all patient-provider communication remains part of the patient’s HIE community record for later reference.

Filling Initial Assessment details by Patients through Virtual Visit is growing rapidly in healthcare. The expansion of virtual care which includes real-time video consultation with a physician via the internet and patient demand for immediate convenient access to healthcare will continue to grow.

Currently, Accessing Specialty Care has a long waiting period

Therefore, it is a must for healthcare providers to have strong communication skills and to get to know the barriers that hinder normal recovery.  The providers need to use their interpersonal skills to obtain this information.  It is an important step in recognizing patients that need extra care outside their practice.  This way, supporting the patient role in emerging care models, will help the specialists to have a better patient experience.

Looking for complete Patient Engagement Solutions?

iPatientCare, Inc., a pioneer in mHealth and cloud-based ambulatory EHR and integrated practice management solutions, announced today broadening of its commitment to serve patients through its innovative Patient Engagement Suite founded on the concepts of Wellness and Chronic Care Management.

iPatientCare Patient Engagement Suite stimulates patient engagement. The Suite includes iPatientCare integrated practice management and EHR, Advanced Patient Portal, Patient Check-in Kiosk, and iPatientCare mobile applications specifically developed for patient- miPHR, miMed, miWater and miCalc. In order to leverage the patient engagement the benefit of the suite provides patient and practice relations strong by making easy interactions with patients and doctor, including reminders, lab results, prescription notifications, clinical alerts and other communications.

iPatientCare stands to save life and provide care, the organization is coming up with the updated version of its wearable technology product- miGlass and miWatch for patient engagement. Patient engagement contributes to improved population health and patient satisfaction, and for providers, it’s a foremost goal of Meaningful Use Stage 2.

As a mandate for providers who are in MU Stage 2, iPatientCare Patient Portal provides a protected communication network between providers and patient. iPatientCare has developed an easy portal called miPHR (Personal Health Records), where patients can review their personal health records, view lab results, request referrals, request refills of authorized prescriptions, view education material, or simply ask general questions to their providers.

iPatientCare plans unveiling some of its innovations at the upcoming HIMSS 2015 at Chicago. Do visit our Booth # 2491.

For more details about iPatientCare Patient Engagement Suite, contact us at sales@iPatientCare.com

Before you rest too much, remember that the Stage 2 clock is ticking. Eligible providers are required to demonstrate 5% of the total patient population that must have viewed, downloaded and transmitted their health information via Patient Portal which would help EP’s to meet Meaningful Use criteria. Also efficiently utilizing Direct Messaging for the exchange of patient health data across different health information systems with the criteria of 10% for transitions and referrals, and demonstrating both of these data to qualify for the incentive is a mandate.

If you don’t have a patient portal and Direct Message in place, now is the time to implement to ensure that you’re on the right path to meeting Stage 2 requirements.

As Stage 2 of Meaningful Use involves complexity and:

Higher thresholds on all measures

Increased interoperability requirements

Results-driven patient engagement

iPatientCare MUPlus service would help you with:

Incident based Support

MU Attestation Support

MU Audit Support

Complete Annual MU Support

Important Timelines from CMS:

Oct. 1, 2014 – Last day for eligible professionals (who are attesting for the first time) to attest to their 90-day reporting period for calendar year 2014 to demonstrate meaningful use for the Medicare EHR incentive program.

Oct. 3, 2014 – Last day for eligible professionals to start their 90 day attestation period (who have attested before) for calendar year 2014 to demonstrate meaningful use for the Medicare EHR incentive program.

Dec. 31, 2014 – Calendar 2014 payment year ends for eligible professionals (who have attested in previous years)

Contact our sales team today at slaes@ipatientcare.com to know more about iPatientCare Patient Portal and Direct Messaging! Avail of our MU Plus service which is more agile and pro-active meaningful use support that would help you earn incentives.

iPatientCare once again makes a mark by standing at 10th Position on Capterra review this year, which was 12th in the year 2013.

iPatientCare takes pride in announcing the inclusion of iPatientCare EHR as one of the nation’s top 20 most popular EHR Software Solutions by Capterra.

Electronic Health Record (EHR) software gives medical professionals access to patient medical records from a centrally-accessible system. With a market size estimated to hit $6 billion by 2015, growing at a rate of over 16% per year, EHR’s typically include medical history, laboratory results, medication, allergies and even billing information to help create a more streamlined process for patient care.

iPatientCare has evolved as a scalable and highly available application platform that integrates Meaningful Use Stage 2 certified ambulatory and inpatient EHR, professional and institutional billing system, patient portal, health information exchange, and mHealth suite. Capterra every year undergoes a fair evaluation process; the ranking is solely based on the popularity index created by Capterra, which includes a number of customers, users, and also how actively the company represents themselves on multiple social networking sites.

We thank all our end-users, business partners and associates for the continuous support and overwhelming response.