How Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital Boosted Its Patient Portal Access

One exec made it his mission to increase patient portal usage with the help of point-of-contact staff.

Patient portals have become an important part of the revenue cycle front end. Aside from scheduling and registering for appointments, they often enable patients to gauge what their experience with a provider will be.

When Ravi Patel joined Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital in 2020 as senior director of digital health, the hospital had a patient portal in place, but it wasn't being fully utilized.

Patel then started to strategize ways the organization could better utilize its patient portal and boost patient engagement and satisfaction, and the results were vast.

"One of the first things we looked at was patient engagement with the tool and more so enrollment with the tool," he said. "And what we found immediately was this significant disparity, and like every other organization, had previously been chopped up to resource differences."

Patel, now the hospital's vice president of digital health, found that these differences ranged from internet and device access to technical knowledge. As a result, there was some hesitancy around pushing the use of the patient portal for fear of putting more pressure on these disparities.

At the time, scheduling an appointment for a new patient took around 40 minutes on average and 27% of patients utilized the patient portal. Of that percentage, less than a third were logged on within three months of their appointment.

In September 2020, the hospital launched its Every Patient, Every Time initiative, where point-of-service staff offered portal access to patients at each contact.

"What we found was just purely telling them about it…was enough to get them activated," Patel said. "So we started to see a steep increase with performance management."

Over 200 members of the hospital's staff got patients to utilize the patient portal, and since 2020 portal usage has gone up to 83%. With more patients using the portal, those who are unable to due to the previously mentioned disparities are now able to call in with shorter waiting and call handling times.

As the hospital continues to manage the performance of the patient portal, it also works alongside its local government to find ways to solve issues related to the disparities it sees.

"If you think about the digital divide that exists, especially when you think about it in socio-economic terms and racial-ethnic terms, it's heavily driven by a lot of preconceived notions," Patel explained. "Those preconceived notions are preventing us from actually closing that gap because we often attribute it to structural pieces."

"I'm not saying that those structural pieces aren't there, but there are things that we have full control over, and I can now proudly say that our organization has fully conquered; that when we offer it consistently to everyone, our patients do get activated."