Patient Portals 2015
Who’s Driving Meaningful Patient Interaction?

1. EPIC, ATHENAHEALTH ARE THE STRONGEST PERFORMERS

Among fully rated vendors, Epic and athenahealth continue to provide the best overall customer experience. Both are highly rated in functionality, patient adoption, and vendor guidance. A trend toward rising expectations led five of eight ranked vendors to drop significantly in performance over the last year. Customers demand closure of functionality gaps, easier interoperability, and more responsive service. Only Medfusion and NextGen showed notable year-over-year improvements.

2. MEDFUSION MOST HELPFUL IN DRIVING PATIENT ADOPTION

Providers running athenahealth, Epic, and Medfusion report that their vendors are most effective in helping them drive patient adoption. All three vendors had over half of their customers report that at least 20% of patients have accessed the portal—a number well beyond the meaningful use bar of 5%. Most providers running other vendors are also getting over the 5% bar, but by a narrower margin. 

3. PATIENT ADOPTION DRIVEN BY ADMINISTRATIVE FUNCTIONALITY AND MANUAL EFFORT

The most popular way to meet the meaningful use Stage 2 requirement for patient data access is to pressure patients to sign up at the point of care. Some providers have even hired staff especially for that purpose, but adoption rates remain relatively low. The most effective way to encourage patient adoption is to offer functionality that patients find useful. Portals like athenahealth, Epic, and Medfusion that offer strong administrative functionality (such as billing and self-scheduling) that saves time for patients’ families get the highest levels of patient adoption.

4. INFLUENCE HEALTH AND RELAYHEALTH ARE FOUND IN THE MOST DIVERSE EMR SETTINGS.

Influence Health and RelayHealth are tackling the most difficult task of consolidating data feeds from multiple EMRs into a single portal, but only RelayHealth appears to be meeting customers’ needs. Allscripts and Medfusion are ranked highest among EMR-agnostic vendors, but Allscripts’ overall score has dropped nine points under the strain of new business, while Medfusion has improved under new management. Both are being used in less diverse settings.