Photo By Flavia Hulsey | It’s January 2020, and because it’s never too early or too late to do what’s...... read more read more
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Commentary by U.S. Public Health Service Capt. Hae Kyung (Amy) Park, Ph.D.
It’s January 2020, and because it’s never too early or too late to do what’s best for your patients, one resolution you as a military health care provider can consider is to inform and encourage your patients to use the secure messaging platforms built into the TRICARE Online Patient Portal (TOL PP) or MHS GENESIS and employ those platforms yourself.
As you may know, patients who directly engage in improving and managing their health make more-informed decisions and are more likely to have positive health outcomes. From mobile apps and wearables to at-home sensors, technology to connect patients with their own care – and with you and your care teams – is becoming more capable and available every day. The more your patients are technologically enabled to be proactive partners, the more you and the Military Health System as a whole are able to achieve the Quadruple Aim: increasing readiness, improving patient health, improving the care experience for providers and patients, and lowering cost.
One of the easiest ways to boost patient engagement is through the TOL PP and eventually MHS GENESIS secure messaging platforms. Similar to commercial services, they enable two-way communication between providers and patients, both in real time and asynchronously. The platforms enhance access, coordination, collaboration, and trust between providers and patients. They vastly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of care and reduce unnecessary telephone calls, face-to-face appointments, emergency room visits, and readmissions. They also serve as the bedrock of connected health best practices, and evolve with other digital health technology to provide a consistent, trusted bridge between you and your patients over time.
Despite secure messaging’s proven benefits for patient engagement, the General Services Administration in April 2017 found that only 47 percent of enrollees at military treatment facilities had registered for secure messaging and only a tiny fraction of those – 6 percent – were actually using it. Lack of information and lack of motivation were the most likely reasons.
Fortunately, the GSA also found that patient enrollment in secure messaging leapt by five times – from 3 percent to 15 percent – when providers during visits took four simple steps to:
1. Personally ask patients to enroll
2. Have onsite staff help patients enroll while there
3. Provide a handout of easy-to-follow instructions to help patients enroll afterward
4. Follow up with an email reminding patients to register
Fifteen percent may not sound like a lot, but as word spreads among patients of how secure messaging improves their care and lives, enrollment and its positive benefits will snowball. So as you wonder which resolutions to actually keep in 2020, remember that secure messaging through MHS patient portals is an easy, streamlined way to establish and maintain patient engagement and achieve what really counts – healthier patients now and in the future.
U.S. Public Health Service Capt. Hae Kyung (Amy) Park, Ph.D., is interim chief of the Defense Health Agency Connected Health branch.
| Date Taken: | 01.28.2020 |
| Date Posted: | 01.28.2020 17:12 |
| Story ID: | 360741 |
| Location: | JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, WASHINGTON, US |
| Web Views: | 187 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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