Erica Gatts
Design Leader and Strategist
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Copy of Patient Engagement

Patient engagement is a project I designed at athenahealth. The goal of the project is to encourage patient-to-provider communication about clinically relevant health information using athena's Patient Portal. This effort is intended to encourage patient engagement with their providers through athena's patient portal, and to help providers meet the secure messaging requirements defined by Meaningful Use.

 

Patient engagement and Meaningful Use

The Patient Engagement project began with an examination of existing data on how well providers using athenahealth's EHR services are performing in meeting the secure messaging requirements of Meaningful Use Stage 2. This requirement dictates that 5% of a provider's patients send a secure message to their provider within a 90-day time period.

We discovered that many of our providers were not meeting this requirement, and began to explore ways in which we could encourage patients to communicate with their doctors using athena's Patient Portal.

I began the first phase of the design by exploring how practices can communicate with their patients across the exam experience. I identified options for how and when a practice can encourage patients to adopt the Patient Portal as a means of communication with their doctors.

Crafting new messages for provider-patient engagement

After identifying these communication touchpoints, I examined the existing emails that athena provides for practices to encourage Patient Portal adoption. I designed three new types of emails that practices could send to patients throughout their experience of coming in for a visit. These emails will soon be A/B tested with a portion of athena's providers to see how they perform against the existing portal invitation emails.

Secure messaging in the Patient Portal

The second design track of the patient engagement project is focused on making it easier for patients to send secure messages to their providers using athena's Patient Portal. I designed an in-context messaging widget that patients can use to send their providers secure messages about clinically relevant information. The initial sketches are shown below.

Design refinement

After sketching several different solutions for an in-context messaging widget, I prototyped how the widget would look and function on the home page of the patient portal, and on pages that contain clinically relevant content.

Mobile secure messaging for patients

I leveraged the existing functionality of the mobile patient portal to allow more opportunities for patients to send in-context secure messages to their providers.