This morning one of my portal colleagues published a post that I wanted to share with our healthcare community. As you can see from the Twitter log below, we are quite passionate about portals and, more importantly, all of the business problems portals can solve within the healthcare industry.
The article in question was written by Forbes, and it explores, as Mark states in his post, “Google is big, smart and has a lot of resources. If they can’t get a health portal right who can?”
So, how do you succeed in a market where Google has failed? Here are some principles to consider:
- Think like a patient, not like search vendor, database vendor, cloud vendor, etc. Patients who want to access a healthcare portal have specific needs for information and action, not just data. As a patient, its nice to see my red blood cell count. But I also want to know what it means when I’m outside the normal range. Can I quickly ask my physician or a nurse advice on what to do?
- A patient portal doesn’t have to add a huge workload to doctors who are already under pressure to see lots of patients. As more doctors get paid on outcomes vs procedures, doctors should welcome greater patient engagement whether its in the office or online.
- Electronic medical records vendors don’t have a lock on patient portals. In the real world, patient data is spread out among several EMR systems. Current EMR vendors are great at pulling in data, but most won’t share data to other systems. A patient portal must be able to integrate with many vendors’ EMRs and other systems like billing, content, analytics, etc.
Have any more ideas? Feel free to comment here or respond to our ongoing conversation on Twitter.
