HealthData Management - December 2012

sician portal to serve local physicians since 2008, with up to 40 doctors being heavy users, 20 others “rather consistent,” and spotty use among the rest, says Scott Rohleder, I. T. director. A big push to sign up physicians and giving portal access to the picture archiving and communication system helped fuel use.

To meet the various data exchange requirements under Stage 2 and better coordinate care, the hospital also is getting ready to build its own health information exchange, and was in the vendor selection process in late 2012. Rohleder is hoping the HIE option will further drive physician buy-in of data exchange.

The hospital now is piloting a patient
portal with a large family medicine clinic,
learning what data is actually displayed
and where the data flows to. Staff mem-
bers at the clinic have worried about a
portal inundating them with patient re-
quests and the hospital is considering
having a centralized service to accept and
route messages from the portal or sent by
secure messaging.

Exchange options
In the ambulatory portal pilot, enrollment
has proven to be cumbersome as patients
need to come to the clinic and have staff
enroll them.
That process could be streamlined by
also offering self-registration online and
via kiosks in the clinics.

Hays Medical’s hospital vendor won’t
be ready to offer an inpatient portal until
January 2013, and that worries Rohleder
and his peers in other hospitals. They
wonder how ready vendors will be for all
of the technology changes necessary un-
der Stage 2, and are afraid that they’ll be
pushing up against deadlines for com-
pleting implementations and workflow
changes. Hays Medical, for instance,
doesn’t expect to get coding for updates
until spring 2013.