How is your facility enticing patients to communicate (send you a secure message) via your patient portal as required for MU Stage 2 Core Measure 17? I would be especially interested in hearing from another specialty office as we are an ENT practice.
Thanks!
We would be interested in suggestions as well.
I would also be interested in some fresh ideas. We are less than 30 days till our GO LIVE with our patient portal.
We attested for stage 2 Q4 2014 and I did a couple of things that improved my numbers.
1. I sent a message to all patients who had a portal account asking them to review their chart and reply with a.) everything looks good or b.) send any corrections or c.) any new medications/medical issues
2. 2 weeks before the holidays I sent an email to all portal patients letting them know that we would have shortened work weeks and we wanted to make sure there prescription refills were filled in a timely manner and then asked them to review there meds and send in any refill request needed.
#2 worked like a charm
If you have Medfusion, talk to your rep. Our rep Phil Mitchell has a lot of great ideas. Our scheduling staff is instructed to get the email address of every patient and tell them why. We do email blasts to everyone who has an email address. Medfusion's software automatically grabs all the email addresses from Centricity and sends the patient an email to "unlock" their patient portal site. Not to sign up, but to unlock. The terminology suggests that they already have an account but they just need to access it.
Personally, I'm not signing up for anything else... but that suggests I need to just go into it and start using it.
Keep email blasts short and sweet. Use the KISS model. Advertise the portal in the waiting room and what it can do. Just a few things we have done.
Does Medfusion have the ability to let you know which patients are on the portal?
Yes they do. I put a wingding in the patient banner next to the patient's name so we can tell if the patient has been to the website.
We ask for their email and sign them up automatically, we don't ask them we just sign them up. They recieve their temporary password before leaving the office along with a rack card that tells them to log in and let us know how their visit went. We also have our staff secure messaging patients to log in and review their lab results.
When you write:
"We attested for stage 2 Q4 2014 and I did a couple of things that improved my numbers.
1. I sent a message to all patients who had a portal account asking them to review their chart and reply with a.) everything looks good or b.) send any corrections or c.) any new medications/medical issues"
How to you know which patients have a portal account so that you can send an email to all of them? Do you send the email from the portal?
During the reporting period I blind copied every patient who had a portal acct wiith a message to review their info etc. Our reporting period was during the holidays Thanksgiving and Christmas so I also blind copied on a message asking if refills were needed as we would be closed for multiple days over the holidays. This was an arduous task with the Kryptic portal but it worked. For ongoing improvement in the responses I set myself up to get notified of every patient that registered on the portal and replied to them with "please check for errors, review their info etc."
Novice question; what is the easiest way to send a mass-secure message to all linked/registered portal users?