athenahealth's Patient Engagement Initiative
The Project & the Challenge
Patient engagement is a project I designed for athenahealth’s patient portal. The challenge of the project was to encourage patient engagement with care providers through athena's patient portal, thus helping participating healthcare providers meet their secure messaging requirements defined under the Affordable Care Act.
My Role
Lead designer
Research and Deveoping Requirements
The Patient Engagement project began with an examination of existing data on how well providers using athenahealth's EHR services were performing in meeting the secure messaging requirements of the Affordable Care Act's Meaningful Use policy. 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.
Exploring Communication Opportunities
I began the first phase of the design by exploring how medical 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 Provider-Patient Communications
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 via athena's mobile Patient Portal.
Project Outcomes
As a result of incorporation new methods and opportunities for patients to communicate securely with their healthcare providers using athena's Patient Portal, we were able to help approximately 60% of the participating providers increase their secure messaging with patients to meet their requirements of the Affordable Care Act within the first 2 months of releasing the new features.