BIDMC Portal: Patient’s Portal to Manage Health Care Anytime
The Patient Site was designed by informaticists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), a Boston teaching hospital. This website serves as a tool for electronic patient-centered communication.
It reduced the shortcomings of traditional e-mail (particularly inadequate security). BIDMC portal offered additional patient-centric features. This portal permitted patients to do the following:
The patients can ask non-urgent questions about care or symptoms using this portal.
Patients can also request an appointment or referral.
They can renew a prescription.
Patients can obtain medication information through BIDMC.
They can update demographic information like phone numbers or addresses.
Patients can review radiology, laboratory, and pathology test results.
They can view and add comments to portions of their medical records.
Patients qualify to register in the BIDMC portal if one of their physicians had registered in the system. All BIDMC physicians were eligible to sign-up in this portal.
This includes hospital-based primary care and subspecialty doctors. It involves an associated network of office-based primary care doctors and subspecialists. Nevertheless, starting enrollment efforts concentrate on primary care clinicians.
BIDMC portal was introduced in April 2000. From March 2004, 180 doctors at 40 practice sites and about 18,435 of their patients have enrolled on this portal. These registered doctors and patients had to log in at least once. Such a group was called as active users. The number of users has increased at a fast rate.
All the important data is safe and secured in the BIDMC portal. All information is encrypted and password protected. The patients and doctors should use a private password to gain access to the system. The patients are notified of any important message through this portal.
The BIDMC will receive the message. This portal sends users a traditional e-mail message along with a link to the BIDMC Web portal. BIDMC has been recognized as one of the most pioneering uses of communication technologies to enhance patient care.
Additionally, the BIDMC portal has been awarded the development team the 2003 “Investing in Information” award. This portal presents data from two sources so that the patient can access features of it and characterize the enrollee profile.
BIDMC portal obtains registered data from the Information Systems Department for a future group study of patients who enrolled in April 2003. At that time, 13,500 patients at all qualified practice sites were registered in the BIDMC portal. All of the 780 patients who signed up in BIDMC from any eligible practice site in April 2003 were incorporated in the future group study.
