Pediatric Informatics: Computer Applications in Child Health (Health ...

24 Information Management by Patients and Parents in Health and Disease 325
refills). Services to streamline and improve care include: online pre-visit forms (that
can be completed through in-office kiosks, saving on paper, clipboards and time spent
on redundant paperwork), Web-based patient surveys, online health monitoring, and
patient teaching that have been shown to be effective. It is believed that physicians
can use these tools to increase productivity by reducing redundant data entry.
Web portals empower patients by allowing them to manage their appointments,
refills, and referrals. Through portals, patients may: access laboratory and imaging
test results as they become available, update their medication lists, drug and food
allergies and medical histories and communicate directly with their providers via
secure messaging. Patients may also manage and their patient accounts with practices.
Many EMR vendors currently provide Web portal services to participating
practices, with practitioners show increasing interest.
Example:
The following Web portal example, provided by an electronic medical record vendor,
shows a (test) patient’s visit dates, immunization history, allergy history and allows
the patient/family to schedule an appointment for health maintenance and to request
information:
In addition to patient appointment scheduling/cancellation, some portals offer
patients online request forms for prescription refills, enrollment/registration and
documents, online review and updating of health and demographic information,
e-mail reminders, secure messaging to providers, online news from the practice,
online consultation and online surveys.
Others offer virtual office visit, symptom assessment, online bill payment, “Ask
a Doctor” function and laboratory result report retrieval.
These examples demonstrate currently available functionality. Future functions
that Web portals may provide patients include: Medical Home functions to help
families to self-manage and co-manage health maintenance (immunizations and
growth) and chronic disease (blood glucose measures in diabetes and peak flow
measurements in asthma) information. There is evidence that this type of information
access can improve patient safety and thereby reduce health care costs (through
decreased hospital and emergency department visits) (Fig. 24.3). 25–29
Fig. 24.3 Example of a pediatric office Web portal (Vendor: Connexin. Practice of Mark
M. Simonian, MD)