News & Events
LSS Patient Portal Provides Online Access to Medical Records at Citizens Memorial Healthcare
January 21, 2010
A new age of patient empowerment has dawned at Citizens Memorial Healthcare (Bolivar, MO) with the roll out of their web-based Patient Portal by LSS Data Systems. Since the successful pilot implementation at two of their clinics last spring, CMH has extended the portal to patients to approximately 10 of their clinics, enabling secure online access to their medical record information via Citizens' own web site.
"Empowering patients by providing access to their medical record through the patient portal is an important part of our service to our patients and the community," said Denni McColm, Chief Information Officer at Citizens. "The ability to view test results, to securely message a physician and to pay a bill online are all services that patients expect and that CMH can now deliver."
Based in Bolivar, a town of roughly 10,000 people, Citizens has emerged as a nationally recognized model for effective and progressive rural healthcare delivery. In 2005, they became the first rural and first non-academic hospital to win the prestigious Davies Award of Excellence, a national award honoring excellence in the use of health information technology. Their implementation of the LSS Patient Portal provides one more tool for connecting and engaging patients across their wide network of rural health facilities.
Patients who visit any of Citizens' family practice clinics may now enroll to receive secure access to their medical record information, including medical problems, medications, immunizations, allergies, vital signs and lab results. Through the portal, patients can also request appointments and prescription refills, view details of their previous visits, and communicate directly with their providers through secure messaging.
Working with LSS product developers, Citizens IT staff implemented the portal and enlisted members of their staff to use it with their own health information, collected from their encounters across the CMH enterprise.
"We started with about 15 staff from our Humansville clinic along with members of our project team," said Karrie Ingram, I.S. Specialist at CMH and portal project leader. "It was very helpful because we could see the data from the patient perspective and the provider perspective."
Ingram said that LSS developers and applications specialists were responsive to her staff's feedback, and LSS development staff agreed that input from Citizens throughout the implementation and rollout of the portal helped make significant improvements that will benefit the large number of customers preparing to launch the LSS portal in 2010.
"It was a very positive collaboration," said Greg Osmonson, LSS Vice President of Programming & Software Development. "Their feedback and suggestions helped refine a product that needs to work for a number of distinct sets of users, from patients and their providers, to billers, schedulers and other office staff."
After the pilot phase utilizing the portal for their own staff, Citizens began signing up patients at their "Health Expos" – a series of free health fairs organized at locations throughout the community. In addition to discounted lab screenings, cancer awareness and other education programming, a booth was set up to demonstrate the Patient Portal and enroll patients. After seeing a demonstration, patients who wished to enroll signed a standard consent form and were provided a temporary password to access their new accounts.
Among those who signed up was a woman with her elderly mother. The two signed a proxy consent form allowing both of them access to the older woman's portal account.
"This is a really useful feature of the portal," said Tricia Pyle, an I.S. Specialist and colleague of Ingram's. "It's not just parents of minors who want access to this kind of information. We provide care for a large elderly population, and their grown children help manage their medical care. Access to this information will help keep them informed and help them contribute to better care for their parents."
Ingram agreed, citing another example. "We have an elderly patient in Humansville whose daughter lives three hours away in Kansas City. She really relies on the portal to help manage his care remotely."
CMH providers have also observed the benefits of the portal. Dr. Paul Stortz, a Family Medicine physician at their Humansville clinic, called the portal "a great tool for the patient to be able to contact us," and Sheila Robins, FNP, noted that it has "helped many of my patients request appointments and refills on their medications."
Another feature both patients and CMH staff have appreciated is online bill pay, which allows patients to securely pay their outstanding balances via credit card or PayPal.
Ingram admitted that some of her colleagues were initially dubious that the portal would result in time savings for providers and office staff.
"Our clinic managers were a little skeptical at first that the portal would save them time and not actually create more work," said Ingram. "But they're realizing now how many phone calls patients were making for routine things that can now be handled via the portal."
Ingram said the manager of one pediatric clinic was impressed with how parents can access their childrens’ immunization histories via the portal and print them for school records. "We get a huge rush for immunization records and this is going to save us a lot of time," she observed.
McColm and her staff have set an ambitious goal for the first half of 2010. They'd like to see a ten-fold increase in the number of registered portal users. Patient access to personal health information stored in medical records is becoming more and more important to healthcare organizations nation wide, since it will be a requirement to qualify for reimbursement incentives associated with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
"We have a 'Patient Portal Expansion Team' in place, which includes members of our IT staff, marketing department and webmaster," said Ingram. "We're ready to hit the ground running first thing next year."
Likewise, LSS has an aggressive schedule to implement the Patient Portal at additional customer sites in 2010. Customers interested in implementing the portal should speak with their Applications Specialist or Sales Associate.
For additional information:
LSS Data Systems
6423 City West Parkway
Eden Prairie, MN 55344
952.941.1000
www.lssdata.com
