Patient portals are ‘an opportunity for you to be a participant in your own care.’

Patient portals are websites that allow patients access to their personal health information – while they’ve been around since the 1990s, they became more popular in the early 2000s with the rise of electronic medical records.

In 2011, the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare services made these portals – and a patient’s remote access to medical records – a requirement. And since then, they’ve continued to evolve into what we know them as today – smartphone apps, websites and more.

Dr. Thomas Selva, a pediatrician and the Chief Medical Information Officer at University of Missouri Health Care, spoke about how patient portals can empower people to play a larger role in their own healthcare and increase access for patients.

Dr. Thomas Selva: When we talk to patients about portals, really what we say is – “This is an opportunity for you to be a participant in your own care.”

It should go without saying, but I'm gonna say it anyway – the most important person on the healthcare team is the patient. In a team of care, around a person's care, that's the most important person.

And, you know, before portals, they were sort of left out of their ability to really engage unless we as physicians or healthcare teams came up with some workaround.

But this gives you the ability to message your doctor when you have questions, to message multiple members of the care team if you have a concern – send us a picture, send us a form.

It's a great way for you to be able to see your lab results sometimes before your physician does, you know, I see them when I have time to look at them. You are more interested in your lab results than anybody else, and you can manage your medications,

So, this is really a big advantage for parents. As a pediatrician, I love the fact that parents can just print off a vaccine record every year and take it for kindergarten roundup, and they're not calling the office, they're not waiting for us to get to it.

I have a lot of parents who send me sports physical forms and daycare forms, and we just fill them out, scan them and attach them right back. It gets rid of a lot of the friction in healthcare that's unnecessary.

But in elder care – I mean, I've done that too, for my parents – is that the ability to be able to communicate with the people who care for your loved one without having to physically bring them into the clinic every time, if it's not necessary, is a huge advantage.

But they’re never foisted on anybody – we don’t say you have to have a portal account. Now, there are other institutions who are really big on it – they want to push this really hard.

But it's better to have someone opt in, because if they're not comfortable using the technology, you don't want to force them into something that's not comfortable for them.

So, you always have the ability to call the office to request a renewal on your prescription, to make an appointment. The advantages, I think, outweigh the disadvantages.

The old ways of doing things are still there – we still have nurses returning phone calls. So, no one's forced into doing it, and we occasionally have families that are just not comfortable.

The issue of technology divide comes up – when we first started pushing the portal to our physicians saying, “This is a great way to engage your patients again,” we had two concerns: the technology divide and elderly people.

And so, it was nice being the caregiver for my elderly parents, and I said, “The most rapidly growing demographic using Google right now are retirees. They are way more tech savvy than you give them credit for. Don't write them off as being dementia, etc.”

I think it's a fantastic way for you to engage as part of your healthcare team, to be more engaged with your physicians and to be more knowledgeable about your own health care. And that will only lead to improving your health.