Intelligence Unit
Special Reports
Special Events
Subscribe
Sponsored
Departments
- Leadership
- Finance
- Technology
- Physicians
- Community Hospitals
- Health Plans
- Marketing
- Quality
- Nursing
- HR
Follow Us
5 Ways to Engage Patients in PHRs
Here are five ways to engage patients in their personal health records:
1. Address privacy concerns. About 75% of the people currently not using a PHR who responded to the CHCF survey call it "a significant barrier" to participation. Providers should stress that electronic data is more secure than paper charts, which might be lying out on a desk where anyone can see them instead of behind a firewall in a password-protected computer.
2. Use patient-centered design principles. To engage patients in online health records, make access and navigation as easy as possible. Arrange data in ways that make sense to a layperson—organizing content by condition, for example, rather than by date of service.
3. Offer familiar services. Patients who do any kind of online business—from banking to shopping (and, really, who doesn't?) will feel comfortable with healthcare services such as online appointment scheduling, appointment reminders, and medication refill requests.
4. Reach out to digital natives. Interactive and relevant content is important to tech-savvy consumers, so build communities and create intelligent tools and searches for them. "Engagement matters," DuLong says.
- 69% of Employers Plan to Offer Healthcare Coverage After 2014
- Building a Better Healthcare Board
- Primary Care Docs Average More Hospital Revenue Than Specialists
- CMS Seeks to 'Rapidly Reduce' Medicare Spending with $1B in Grants
- Hospital Pricing Data Dump Won't Hurt You, Yet
- Quiet ORs Better for Patient Safety
- Case Study: Advance Care Conversations
- CMS Releases Hospital Pricing Data
- Patient Harm Data to Remain on Medicare's Hospital Compare Site
- Evidence-Based Practice and Nursing Research: Avoiding Confusion
Comments are moderated. Please be patient.
Gerald A. Theis (4/16/2011 at 10:46 AM)
Good points but there are more requirements and standards to increase PHR usage and it will come through mobile health technology, standardization and innovative solutions. Additional incentives for use are: convenience, easy-to-use, affortability, consumer ownership, personal medical emergency preparedness, multi-functional and interoperability anywhere anytime.