Nursing Informatics Coursework Writing: Patient Portals

Nursing Informatics: Patient Portals
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Institutional Affiliation
Nursing Informatics:Patient Portals
Background
All technologies are designed to solve problems. Hospital settings offer significant challenges to communication of health information between caregivers and patients. Diseased people usually have several active conditions, get complex treatments, and undergo several tests that develop during their hospital stay. On the other hand, provider teams are big and team participation is active because of the demand to offer care 24/7. Moreover, the verbal information offered to patients throughout daily rounds is rarely complemented by any other means of communication. Consequently, these problems cause hospitalized patients to have insufficient understanding and less than optimum commitment in their primary care (O’Leary et al, 2016). In past years, patients were unable to access their medical information that led to lower health-related results. According to Alfano (2016), the problem of patients not actively participating in their health care is significant because patients need to understand their health and related conditions to enable better primary care and improve outcomes. When patients become more active they not only improve their health care but also help reduce costs.
This technology is an innovation that supports and enhances patient engagement, which have significant potential to boost population health (Ancker et al, 2015). Patient’s portals are technical innovations that are broadly expected to assists patients develop more knowledge about and dynamically participate in healthcare. This technology enables patients to get information from electronic health records of their medical care institutions (Ancker et al, 2015). A basic patient portal permits patient to view their visit history, their current laboratory results, their present prescription list, plus other medical information stored in their medical care provider’s EHR. Moreover, this innovation occasionally provides secure messaging and emailing with the institution, access to electronic libraries with patient education resources, visit scheduling, and other patient-inclined functions (Ancker et al, 2015). A patient portal functions by creating a web-based platform with an interactive functionally that can interface with several streams of data fetched from several electronic health records.As O’Leary et al (2016), describes patient portals leverage electronic health records in an exertion to enlighten and engage patients.
Quality
Patient portals have improved patient care quality and safety in several ways. The adoption of these health information technologies creates a potential to improve care quality by enhancing care access, chronic conditions management, efficiency, as well as patient and family participation. To expedite contact with online resources, several medical care institutions have formed patient portals. The integration of patient portals with an EHR or other automated health data creates functionalities that enable patient-provider communication as well allows patients arrange appointments, refill medications, pay hospital bills, and obtain or review lab results (Emont, 2011). The effectiveness will be measured using different patient-level measures. The outcomes can be assessed based on the use of patient portal features, comparisons in regards to patient demographics (users and non-users), overall patient satisfaction with the innovation, and patient participation. Emont (2011) claims that these measures help to improve the functionality and the influence of patient portals in different populations such people with chronic conditions.
Patient portals improve care quality by enabling email messaging, which is effective to request medication drug refills, enquire other medical-related issues or update demographic details (O’Leary et al, 2016). This kind of virtual communication can aid improve office workflow and usually is more useful for the patient. Unlike the traditional ways of communication such as voicemail or telephone call, the medical team becomes more efficient for it does not have to stop and answer the call. Some portals have the capacity to generate an email and text reminders to respective patients. The innovation can contact the sick person after any new prescription to enquire about any side effects enhancing patient safety. According to O’Leary et al (2016), the email messaging feature enabling reminders helps in patient safety, especially when sending weather and storm forewarns for asthmatic patients, weekly calories for congestive heart problems patients, weekly recipes for hypertensive patients, and others.
The portal content provided by both the providers and patients enables safety of the patient by including information regarding present medications; consumption of both general and brand names; including scheduling of the last prescription for the required treatments, and showing the category or purpose of medications. According to O’Leary et al (2016), safety is also enhanced when both hospitalized and outpatients access all kinds of test results- whereby the results are useful for effective treatment. They further assert that patient portals enhance extended care because it extends the office appointments into the home, as patients turn more complex and appointments shorter. Using the existing innovation, providers can extend the care beyond the office appointments and into homes. Some portals now permit a care provider to create certain groups for a client. According to O’Leary et al (2016) online interventions such as exercise, diet or smoking cessation and other online resources are connected to the goals created by the care provider. Management of chronic conditions has become possible because the provider can monitor and feedback goals.
According to Alfano (2016), patient portals improve patient care quality by being doorways to other services linked to the care of the patient. Sole sign-on or pass-through authentication can create access to the several kinds of medical-related products and services easy for a patient. Many patients have their medication filled by treatment clearing house sites. Getting into these websites from the prescriptions list will assist patients to ask more medication, pay their medication bills and make queries. Upon developing a medical concern, most patients search for information on online search engines and obtain online advice from unknown sources. However, through patient portals, patients connect with trusted and known providers of this kind of information helping them avoid unnecessary visits, get help sooner the symptoms appear, and prevent them from being misguided by unreliable online sources (Alfano, 2016).
Stakeholders
Nurses are among the key stakeholders because the patient portals enhance electronic communication between the patient and the nurse. The inclusion of safe messaging in the portal as part of the nursing practice provides nurses an exceptional alternative that permits more regular and timely communication between the two parties. When nurses influence the portal development, this helps create awareness in the system as well as the resulting implications for nursing practice (Rodriguez, 2010). This innovation supports the nursing practice by improving communication and saving time and thus nurses help improve patient satisfaction. The physicians are key stakeholders because they require incentives to contribute in such services, mainly via compensation for their practice, as well as offering better care. The patients have to be convinced that these portals provisioned by the innovation can supply them, with proper quality of safe, dependable, care service while providing the added expediency of getting access to medical advice from an online physician. Insurers are also stakeholders because they require a proper comprehension of how this innovation is going to be executed, as well as the related costs, paybacks, governing policies, and rules, hence it can be encompassed in insured services. Therefore, the effectiveness of patient portals relies on the buy-in from the above stakeholders.
Organizational impacts
Adopting a patient portal is hugely regards presenting a state-of-the-art technology, as well as dealing with the change process that trails to reduce disruption and smoothen acceptance of the technology. This introduction o...