⚕️ Patient Portal Engagement Strategies

Plus: Smartphone Recordings For TB Diagnosis, and more

January 12, 2024

Welcome to the latest edition of HealthTech Zen. Here’s what we are covering today:

  • 5 Effective Strategies For Engaging Patients on Online Portals

  • Smartphone Recordings for Tuberculosis Diagnosis

  • Deep Dive: NLP in Healthcare

ANALYSIS
5 Effective Strategies For Engaging Patients on Online Portals

Online patient engagement is now the new normal.

  • 75% of patients reported using an online patient portal.

  • 81% of applicants would use a secure online portal to schedule appointments.

  • 50% of patients say a bad online experience can ruin their relationship with a provider. 39% said a great online experience can solidify their relationship.

Effective patient portal engagement is necessary to curb healthcare costs, preserve resources, and improve patients’ health.

This article takes a deep dive into 5 proven strategies for boosting engagement levels of online patient portals.

  1. Segregating Patient Population: Personalizing treatment plans based on demographics, psychographics, and social determinants of health.

  2. Starting Engagement Before Visit: Utilizing online appointment scheduling, notifications, and intake forms to enhance patient experience and satisfaction.

  3. Patient Engagement During Visit: Using patient portals to access medical records, involving patients in treatment plans, maintaining price transparency, and encouraging open communication.

  4. Importance of Shared Decision-Making: Involving patients in decision-making about tests, care plans, and treatment through features like calling and messaging in patient portals.

  5. Aftercare Patient Portal Engagement: Utilizing patient portals for post-discharge care with features like chats, video calling, medication reminders, vital checks, emergency contact, payment updates, and health education.

Read more about how medical practices can boost engagement levels of their patient portals here.

TOP STORY
Smartphone Recordings for Tuberculosis Diagnosis

  • Tuberculosis was the second-most common cause of death from an infectious disease worldwide. 

  • A total of 1.3 million people died from TB in 2022.

Diagnosing someone with TB as opposed to other respiratory illnesses such as asthma, pneumonia, or Covid can be challenging, especially where molecular tests on cultures of saliva and mucus are not accessible. Technology is helping overcome this shortcoming. 

TB screening with smartphones: Researchers have come up with a tool that uses smartphone recordings to detect coughs specific to TB.

How it works: The audio framework, called TBscreen, was trained in Nairobi, Kenya, on 33,000 natural coughs and 1,200 forced coughs and tested on 149 patients who had pulmonary TB and 46 patients with other respiratory conditions.

The test’s sensitivity was about 70% when used on recordings from a Google Pixel 2 smartphone (the best performer). The scientists hope their tool can become a point-of-care cough-based TB screen. 

DEEP DIVE
What Is NLP in Healthcare?

Natural Language Processing (NLP) in healthcare refers to the application of artificial intelligence (AI) and computational linguistics to interpret and understand human language within the context of healthcare data.

In the healthcare domain, NLP plays a pivotal role in transforming unstructured medical text into structured data, extracting valuable information from clinical notes, medical records, research papers, and other textual sources.

Read about 6 key applications of NLP in healthcare here.

SNIPPETS
What else is making news

  • YouTube is taking a dive into the healthcare industry to produce step-by-step, explainer videos on first aid topics. Mass General Brigham, the Mexican Red Cross and the American Heart Association are partnering with youtube to create content like CPR instructions, how to administer naloxone during an opioid overdose and how to stop bleeding. These will be pinned at the top of search results in an effort to make public health information truly public.

  • Hospital and health system merger and acquisition activity increased 27% year over year to 75 announced transactions in 2023. The increase in M&A activity is attributed to cooling macroeconomic headwinds as strategic discussions between hospitals and health systems pick up steam.

  • Boston Children's Hospital is among the early adopters of the new ChatGPT Team platform from OpenAI that allows companies to customize their generative artificial intelligence uses.