Hospital and Physician Update

January – February 2020

5 tips for improving patient portal engagement

Online patient portals are digital tools that offer a convenient and timely means of communication between patients and providers. In addition, they streamline administrative tasks, such as patient registrations, check-ins and appointment scheduling.

Here are some tips for improving patient portal engagement that you may want to share with your staff:

1. Mention the portal in your on-hold messaging and voicemail recordings. Include features they’ll enjoy and how to sign up. Emphasize conveniences, such as 24/7 ability to schedule appointments, request medications or review reports.
2. Put flyers and posters where patients are waiting for appointments and have time to read.
3. Add a tagline on appointment cards, statements and newsletters, such as: “Tired of playing phone tag? Sign up for our patient portal.”
4. Include your portal registration details in checkout materials.
5. Put a link to your patient portal login at the top of your practice website homepage.

Webinar posted
We recently conducted a webinar for health care providers, titled Let us Help you help them: Your patients’ experience, to discuss the value of patient portals and how to foster and improve patient engagement with portals. We’ve posted the webinar, as well its PowerPoint presentation, on our new Patient Digital Engagement Toolkit webpage. The webinar and presentation have also been posted on the Provider Event Presentations section of web-DENIS.

In addition to addressing the value of patient portals, the webinar looked at how the Blue Cross member portal can improve patient satisfaction and streamline administrative tasks. For more details, see Order the Patient Digital Engagement Toolkit item in our “In brief” feature, also in this issue.

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