Increasing Patient Portal Usage and Identifying Best Practices

The William F. Ryan Community Health Network is a family of nonprofit, federallyqualified health centers that deliver care to diverse, underserved communities. With stricter documentation regulations and increased requirements to use electronic health records for patient recordkeeping, the Ryan Network requested a Capstone team to formulate recommendations based on best practices to improve the use of an online patient portal, which provides access to key pieces of information from the patient's medical record, for both patients and clinicians. With the help of organizational leadership and frontline staff, the team conducted both patient and clinician focus groups in order to gather data on portal usage and preferences of patients and clinicians. Using this data, the group designed a robust marketing campaign to increase both awareness and usage of the patient portal. The Capstone team then provided evidence-based recommendations to effectively utilize this technology, outlining a tailored approach to ensure the technology is used to help the center meet anticipated requirement changes, provide outstanding patient-centered care, and improve patient outcomes for the patient population as a whole.