The following is written by Marion K. Jenkins, PhD, FHIMSS, founder and CEO of QSE Technologies.
Does your surgery center have an online strategy? Do you make it easy for your patients to communicate with your ASC and your docs? Can they ask questions, schedule appointments or find out about test results? A new survey from Intuit Corp. shows that online attitudes among American patients definitely favor more and better online tools.
The survey polled 1,000 Americans this past January, and the results are very interesting. The survey asked about healthcare costs, and the ongoing confusion in paying medical bills and insurance bills, plus attitudes towards communicating online with their physicians' offices. This article focuses on this last area, patients' attitudes towards online technology.
Here are some selected results:
- 81 percent said they would like to be able to schedule their appointments online and fill out medical forms electronically in advance of the appointment.
- 78 percent said they would use a secure online method to access their medical histories and share information with their provider.
- Patients would consider switching providers to those who provide more online access. This result had an age bias. 59 percent of so-called Gen Y respondents said they would consider switching to doctors who provided better online access, versus 29 percent of baby boomers.
- Nearly 20 percent of all patients said they cannot easily contact their physicians or their offices to ask questions, obtain lab results or schedule appointments.
It is fascinating that this situation exists in healthcare, which represents roughly 1/6th of the entire U.S. economy and has millions of transactions every day — most of which are manual, paper/fax-based and/or phone-intensive. One can order a pizza online, track a small package literally across the United States, reserve a theater seat or a poolside table at just about any restaurant. But if you have simple blood work done through most physicians' offices, clinics or outpatient centers, you have to wait for days for the results and it usually requires at least 2-3 phone calls.
ASCs represent a unique opportunity to get ahead of the technology curve. First, since many ASCs are newer, they don't have the mountains of paper records that typically accumulate over many years in a hospital or physician practice. So ASCs don't have the same issues with migrating tons of existing records. Second, ASCs tend to be more advanced technologically than other facilities, and that translates into more technology that is obvious to patients. Patients are more aware of technology, and associate it with better medical outcomes. And lastly, since ASC patients are in many cases making a conscious choice to be treated in an outpatient facility, they have choices. So ASCs have an incentive to make their facility as attractive and up to date as possible.
According to this study, ASCs would be well-served to have a robust and convenient online strategy to help their patients communicate online with the facility and their providers.
It is relevant to ask why a company like Intuit would undertake a study like this. Intuit is probably best known for its consumer- and small business-focused financial software, including Quicken, QuickBooks and TurboTax. But they also have a health division that has developed a patient portal application.
Marion K. Jenkins, PhD, FHIMSS, is founder and CEO of QSE Technologies, which provides IT consulting and implementation services for ASCs and other medical facilities nationwide. Learn more about QSE Technologies at www.qsetech.com.
Read more from Marion Jenkins:
- Did You Get Your Free iPad Yet: Social Networking Still Represents Risks for Surgery Centers
- Critical Surgery Center Advice: Work to Prevent User-Enabled HIPAA Data Breaches
- Surveys Reveal Surging Interest in Healthcare IT by Investors, Providers