Portal solutions are no longer a nice-to-have, but a have-to-have. Why? Because your staff and patients are fed up with wasting so much time tracking down the information they need when they need it. They're also at the end of their patience for cumbersome, paper-based transactions and processes. You can hardly blame people accustomed to the convenience of Web sites and Web-based services in other industries-from airline sites where they can learn their latest mileage balance and book flights to financial services sites where they can pay bills online and research investments-for wondering why their healthcare organization doesn't provide the same level of convenience and efficiency. I view the portal as the new front door for the healthcare organization. It's the gateway through which information, people, and transactions pass back and forth. It's no longer sufficient just to serve up brochure-ware. People have come to expect that your portal is the transactional centerpiece for your organization. Microsoft can help you with this. By reducing the hassle factor and saving time for everyone, Microsoft Health Portal solutions can help you not only meet, but exceed the expectations of your patients, clinicians, and administrators as well as your local medical community-making your front door one they all want to enter. Microsoft Health Portal SolutionsMicrosoft Health Portal solutions provide a central location where healthcare professionals and patients can share and analyze information, complete transactions and workflow, and collaborate, all via the familiar look and feel of Microsoft Office applications, e-mail, or Web browsers. What's more, Microsoft Health Portal solutions have both enterprise content management capabilities-with features such as document management, search, policy, records management, and forms management-and business intelligence capabilities. Health Portal solutions can also be extended through the use of Microsoft Unified Communications technologies, providing caregivers with the ability to find and contact their colleagues from within the portal via e-mail, messaging, phone, or Web, audio, or video conferencing and to automatically create records of these communications. A complete, interoperable set of technologies, Health Portal solutions can be customized and scaled to meet the specific needs of your organization, and they can help you realize greater value from the technologies you already own. Depending on their functionality, Health Portal solutions can be classified as clinical, administrative, or patient portals. Clinical PortalsTime-challenged clinicians need faster and easier ways to access the most up-to-date patient information from the many places they work. And they need to be able to efficiently and effectively communicate and collaborate with each other regarding patient care. Clinical portal solutions can help by providing a centralized hub where caregivers and teams of specialists can access the most recent and consolidated patient information, such as test results, medications, images, progress notes, transcriptions, and orders. Clinical portals also help clinicians work together more efficiently via team services, bulletin boards, discussion groups, and other portal features that facilitate new ways to communicate and share information. All of this means your caregivers can spend less time tracking down information, people, and processes and more time taking care of patients. In fact, Atlantic Health anticipates that the Microsoft SharePoint Server-based portal solution it's using will reduce time spent on administrative tasks by 35 percent, which will improve clinical research efficiency and capacity. "Because we will spend less time creating, handling, and searching for paperwork, our clinical and drug trials will be much more efficient and expeditious," says Jacque Brodt-Suggs, director of application support at Atlantic Health. "We anticipate that we will be able to conduct additional trials each year, which will lead to greater research and more sponsorship proceeds." Clinical portal solutions can also help healthcare organizations connect with the local medical community. For example, Hospital of Saint Raphael, a community teaching hospital affiliated with Yale University School of Medicine, is using a portal solution based on Microsoft technology to engage a predominantly voluntary, non-hospital-employed, community-based medical staff that has many area options for hospital care. Saint Raphael's collaborative portal makes it easier for providers to work with the hospital and provide the highest level of care possible to patients. The portal provides the infrastructure for dynamic worksites for multidisciplinary teams and for collecting form-based quality improvement data. It has also made it easier and faster for healthcare providers to access clinical records from various departments and different data warehouses. It not only pushes information to the appropriate providers, but it also allows providers to more quickly and efficiently pull the information they need for their medical decision making. Ultimately, this results in better care for Saint Raphael's patients and better provider efficiency and satisfaction. Administrative PortalsSpeaking of efficiency, when there's a sudden drug recall or notification about a particular procedure or piece of equipment, you don't have time to waste. You certainly don't have time to manually update the three-ring binders filled with policies and procedures found at every nursing station. Now, with administrative portals and embedded enterprise content management capabilities, you can instantly update policies and procedures across the organization when you receive an alert or recall. Enterprise search allows you to find every instance in your policies and procedures that refers to the recalled drug, particular procedure, or piece of equipment and make needed changes. These capabilities also allow you to control who can read, write, and edit your policies and procedures, providing versioning, rights management, history and security controls, defined electronic publishing, and notification and distribution processes. That is just one example of how administrative portals can help your healthcare organization function better. Administrative portals can also ensure that health records are collected, managed, and disposed of in a consistent and uniform manner across the organization, allow health administrators to access information and people more easily using search capabilities, and improve business practices by consolidating operational information from multiple departments and entities. In addition, the out-of-the-box workflow tools these solutions provide help manage business processes that are outside the realm of your core information systems. For example, St.Vincent Heart Center of Indiana (SVHCI) uses its portal solution to create custom workflows that automate and streamline the work of its many committees. Ultimately, administrative portals make life much easier for your staff. This has been the case at SVHCI, which is using an integrated portal solution based on Office SharePoint Server 2007 that organizes everything from the most current hospital newsletter to a required clinical form. "With Office SharePoint Server 2007, we can make more information available to team members, and that information is more accurate and more timely," explains Stephanie Hinchman, project manager and administrator of SharePoint and marketing specialist at SVHCI. "This is important for nurses, for example, because they don't have a lot of time. When they need something such as physician on-call information, important links to medications, or policies and procedures, they now can find it quickly and easily. When they can do that, they are not as stressed and that keeps up the morale." Patient PortalsPatient portals make it easier for patients to interact with your organization. With these solutions, patients can use electronic forms to provide personal information and medical history, renew prescriptions, make appointments, and review and pay charges online. You can also make information such as medical records, lab results, care plans, and medical images available to patients via the portal to keep them informed about their health. And to meet patient expectations for transparency and improve your organization's competitiveness, you can use a patient portal to make available current information about quality initiatives, key performance indicators, regulatory compliance, and hospital best practices, too. Ultimately, a patient portal can help you equip patients to more proactively manage their health. This is what the New Zealand Health IT Cluster - a collaborative group of healthcare software developers, consultants, government agencies, and providers-has found in implementing its Consumer Health Portal on the Microsoft platform. "Consumer Health Portal is one of the ways that we can interact with patients and put them in control," says Paul Roseman, design and development manager of ProCare, an organization representing general practitioners and nurses in Auckland. "The tools, services, and health information made available through the portal can help [patients] change their lives and achieve their health goals." The Consumer Health Portal also provides a centralized information repository that supports collaboration among healthcare system providers. Hospitals, physicians, laboratories, and other institutions can now exchange information easily, with health information systems and data connected into one integrated platform. "Combined with and surrounded by Microsoft's world-class communication and collaboration tools and other resources, I think it is safe to say that a new day in the use of technology in the healthcare sector has truly arrived," says Andrea Pettett, CEO, New Zealand Health IT Cluster. Microsoft Health Portals can help you bring this new day to your healthcare organization as well. With these solutions, your front door will provide the sort of two-way flow of information, transactions, and processes your savvy patients, staff, and local medical community have come to expect.
 | Dr. Bill Crounse, M.D.
Dr. Bill Crounse, M.D., is senior director, worldwide health for Microsoft Corporation. Dr. Crounse is responsible for working with industry partners and healthcare organizations to help them benefit from using Microsoft technologies and solutions. Prior to joining Microsoft, Dr. Crounse was vice president and chief medical information officer for Overlake Hospital Medical Center and the Overlake Venture Center in Bellevue, Wash. Also, read Dr. Crounse's Healthcare Web log to get more insights into the latest technologies and trends in the healthcare industry. |
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