- Healthcare APIs Put Patients in Control of Their Data
“Patients in the inpatient portal group had lower 30-day hospital readmissions (5.5% vs. 12.9% tablet-only and 13.5% usual care; P = 0.044). There was evidence of a difference in patient engagement with health information between the inpatient portal and tablet-only group, including looking up health information online (89.6% vs. 51.8%; P < 0.001),” the article related.
Patient portals can be used to engage patients through improved patient communications to provider participation in federal programs. Despite portal utility and provider efforts to motivate use, meaningful patient portal adoption has remained relatively low.
A 2017 GAO report found that only 15 percent of patients in hospitals accessed their health data on a patient portal even though 88 percent of hospitals offered patients portal access. Overall, fewer than one-third of patients accessed their electronic health information, and patients said that their access generally occurs before or after seeing a healthcare provider.
For the report, GAO analyzed 2015 data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Medicare Electronic Health Record Incentive Program.
The report related that HHS has invested more than $35 billion in health IT, including efforts to improve patient access to electronic health information. One of the largest programs is the Medicare EHR Program, which encourages providers to make electronic health information available to patients.
Program data showed that healthcare providers that participated in the program (3,218 hospitals and 194,200 healthcare professionals) offered most of their patients the ability to electronically access health information. Patients generally described this access as beneficial, but noted limitations such as the inability to aggregate their health data from multiple sources into a single record.
“Data from the 2015 Medicare EHR Program show that relatively few patients electronically access their health information when offered the ability to do so. Patients GAO interviewed described primarily accessing health information before or after a health care encounter, such as reviewing the results of a laboratory test or sharing information with another provider,” the report said.
“While HHS has multiple efforts to enhance patients’ ability to access their electronic health information, it lacks information on the effectiveness of these efforts. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) within HHS collaborates with CMS to assess CMS’s Medicare EHR Program as well as its own efforts to enhance patient access to and use of electronic health information. However, ONC has not developed outcome measures for these efforts consistent with leading principles for measuring performance,” it said.
GAO recommended that HHS develop performance measures to assess outcomes of patients’ electronic access to health information efforts and use the data from these measures to help achieve program goals.
