Whether you’ve used a patient portal for years or are a beginner who is possibly wary of downloading one more app on your phone, it’s worth checking out some of the benefits of your patient portal.
The most common patient portal is MyChart, created by Epic Systems. Its popularity can make the experience of using it more seamless for a patient: If you learn how to use it for one provider, then adding other providers is simple.
“Whether you’re connecting through a mobile application, through a website on the desktop or on your mobile device — or increasingly through omni-channel tools like SMS, — my chart is how you as a patient connect with your care team and your medical information,” said Taylor Seale, telehealth and RPM product lead for Epic. “So you’re interacting with the same system that your doctor uses.”
And sharing that health information with family members is built into the software, potentially making life easier for parents managing their child’s care or adult children managing their parents’ care.
“We call that proxy access,” Seale said. The patient, or proxy subject, can grant access to their chart to anyone, allowing them to see appointments, medications and visit notes from doctor’s appointments, and also interact with their caregivers."
Another convenience is the ability to manage how your providers contact you, be it telephone, email, text or through an app notification.
“So that ability to personalize and say, ‘here’s how I want you to reach out to me for appointment reminders or medication refill reminders,’ is … super-important” in maintaining one’s health," Seale said.