Behavioral Health Integrator

The introduction of electronic personal health records (PHR) systems, and the patient portals used to provide patients access to those records, into the fabric of the U.S. healthcare system provides a major opportunity to encourage positive health management practices, such as chronic disease management and increased care plan adherence, through greater engagement of the patient.  Unfortunately, there is still a broad gap between the effective use of PHR technologies where advanced health information services are perhaps most needed, especially within the underserved communities supported by community health centers. This guide provides health centers with an adoption framework that can be used to assess the goals and methods for deploying electronic patient engagement services.

This Chilmark Research report discusses challenges to current patient portal systems which may help health center leadership better understand why or why not they are encountering issues when trying to effectively engage their clients with patient portal systems.

This video may also provide insights to various technologies that health centers may consider adopting to further achieve patient activation and engagement goals.

The Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) has recently published several patient portal stories from patients who found success in being able to better understand their and their families conditions, care plans and health services received. These patient portal stories are meant to help both providers and patients understand how patient portals can increase a patient's engagement with their care and increase communication between healthcare staff and patients and between patients and their family members.

Patients experience difficulty in managing their health due to a multitude of reasons.  Through use of consumer health information systems and services (CHISS)  it is hoped that patient’s feelings of control over their health will increase. In order to evaluate the level in which patients feel engaged or activated the study patient survey tools such as the Patient Activation Measure (PAM) can be used to understand the effect that CHISS are having on a health center's population.  

When deploying personal health information systems such as patient portals Health Centers will often encounter challenges in effectively engaging their patient population. Understanding where these challenges are originating can at times be difficult to determine. One obvious area of evaluation is in determining whether the system being deployed is appropriately usable for the population.