A HealthMine survey revealed that 45 percent of Medicare Advantage beneficiaries don’t know if they have access to a patient portal.
Over half of Medicare Advantage beneficiaries want access to their own medical records, but most say they can’t access a patient portal from their payer, or at least don’t know if they can, according to new data from HealthMine.
Patient portals are at the heart of patient engagement efforts for both providers and healthcare payers. These tools allow patients to view their own medical data, learn more about their health, and transmit health information to relevant parties when applicable.
And most health plans and nearly all providers are recognizing this potential. Recent data from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) has found that patient portal offerings reached over 90 percent in 2019, while HealthMine confirmed that many health plans are also offering a similar tool to their members.
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But patients aren’t necessarily aware of these technology offerings, the HealthMine survey of nearly 800 Medicare Advantage beneficiaries showed. Forty-five percent of respondents said they weren’t sure if their MA plans offered access to a patient portal, while 18 percent said they had no access to a portal.
When patients do have access, it’s not exactly simple. Seven percent of respondents said it wasn’t easy getting to their member portal to view their own medical records. Only 30 percent of all respondents said it was easy to access their own medical records.
Age could be a factor in limited patient portal use, HealthMine suggested. Citing 2018 statistics from the University of Michigan National Poll on Healthy Aging, HealthMine pointed out that patient portal use among patients ages 50 to 80 hangs around 50 percent.
Stratified further, the survey found that 52 percent of patients ages 50 to 64 had adopted the portal, while 49 percent of patients ages 65 to 80 have adopted the tool.
A general distrust of digital health tools and online patient-provider communication was the cause of limited patient portal uptake, the UM survey indicated.
Of those who did not sign up for the patient portal, 52 percent said they had security concerns about communicating medical information digitally. Fifty percent said they didn’t see a need for that level of patient health data access, while 40 percent said they simply hadn’t gotten around to setting up their accounts yet.
However, age may not be the only thing at play, the HealthMine researchers conceded.
“The good news is almost all providers and plans in the health care system are offering patient portals for electronic medical record access,” said HealthMine Vice President of Member Engagement Products Nicole Althaus. “Not all Americans are taking advantage of this convenience. It’s not only confined to Medicare beneficiaries. We know connecting patients to data in real-time is the key to patients taking health actions to avert health care incidents.”
Previous reports have also indicated that although many payers and providers are facilitating access to a patient portal, few patients are actually using the tool, regardless of age. A 2017 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) revealed that while around 90 percent of healthcare organizations offer access to a patient portal, only about one-third of patients have used the technology.
And despite provider efforts to garner more active patient portal use, industry experts suggest that better patient education about the tool and more usable interfaces could increase patient use. Creating a mobile-optimized patient portal, for example, could lead more patients to integrate the tools into their own self-management routines.
There is also something to be said about the functionality within the patient portal and how they can impact certain patient populations. The patient portal is useful for disseminating lab results to patients or letting patients fill new providers in on their medical histories, which are usually one-off actions for a patient with one or no chronic illnesses.
These are certainly signs of patient activation in care, but may not yield regular and robust patient portal use.
Adding other functions within the portal, such as online appointment scheduling or prescription refill requests, could lead to more active use on the part of the typical patient with limit chronic illness.
Date: October 04, 2019
Source: PatientEngagementHIT