Secure electronic messaging between patients and providers has become a major goal of the healthcare industry in order to achieve higher levels of patient engagement. Since the HITECH Act was passed in 2009, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) began pushing forward EHR implementation, patient engagement, and EHR interoperability via the meaningful use requirements.
Under Stage 2 and Stage 3 Meaningful Use regulations, CMS expects eligible healthcare providers to utilize secure electronic messaging when communicating with their patients. This can help ease access to physicians among a varied patient population, ONC stated.
Secure electronic messaging has many benefits including boosting care coordination, addressing minor health problems, tracking certain side effects or chronic conditions, and answering patient questions. Additionally, secure electronic messaging could be used for efficient drug refills or referrals. For more information on attesting to the secure electronic messaging objectives under Stage 2 and Stage 3 Meaningful Use requirements, view this CMS documentation.
There is one significant barrier that could stand in the way of effective secure electronic messaging and its overall goals for patient engagement. There is a wide range of inconsistent and limited health literacy among the patient population, which harms the potential effectiveness of secure electronic messaging, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA).
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The study focused on understanding the readability quality of both patient and physician electronic messages. The researchers viewed 31 e-mail exchanges between providers and patients from a primary care clinic, which resulted in a total of 119 messages. Mean word count and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Levels were used to better understand the readability of the messages and propose hypotheses on improving communication.
“Patients used more words in their initial e-mails compared to providers, but the FKGLs were similar, and 68 percent of provider messages were written below an FKGL = 8. Of 31 exchanges, 9 (29 percent) contained at least one patient message with an FKGL > 3 grade levels lower than the corresponding provider message(s),” the research paper stated. “Our study demonstrates that most providers are able to respond to patient electronic messages with a matching reading level.”
Along with secure electronic messaging, the patient portal provides a variety of services including patient access to their health records and the ability to request refills or view their latest laboratory test results. As previously stated, patient engagement is a major objective of the entire healthcare industry including federal agencies.
“We really need to consider the patient as a disruptive force in improving health care,” Dr. Farzad Mostashari, former head of ONC, told EHRIntelligence.com. “It starts with people being able to get access to their own health information so they can be empowered by the data. But the next step is to ask, ‘now that I can get it, why would I get it, and what can I do with it? How do I organize it, how do I understand it, how do I share it?’ At the ONC, we believed that rather than set up a central PHR for the country, as some countries have done, that if the policy makers help liberate patient data, there will be an ecosystem that helps patients do that. So that was a leap of faith.”
Date: July 17, 2015