Inside Duke Medicine

HealthView succeeds as vital patient tool

HealthView, Duke Medicine’s patient information portal, is nearly two years old now, and proving to be wildly successful.

The portal, at https://healthview.dukehealth.org, is the result of Duke’s efforts to provide patients with an efficient, secure and easy-to-use online tool combining scheduling, clinical and billing functions.

Duke Medicine leaders, offers patients, providers and even the U.S. health care system an exciting and empowering innovation.

The numbers agree.

More than 100,000 patients are now registered on the site. They’re using it around the clock and even around the globe, logging on from near and far to check lab results, pay bills – totaling more than $10 million so far – and schedule follow-up appointments.

Duke Medicine employees and their families make up a quarter of the portal’s users, said Pete L’Engle, senior programme manager for eHealth in Duke Health Technology Solutions. He is proud of the portal’s progress, and anticipating more functions – many requested by patients themselves – over the coming years.

There’s no need to wait, though. HealthView offers a number of very useful tools.

Through the portal, patients can schedule their own appointments – routine, sick or follow-up visits, as well as annual exams – at all Duke Primary Care practices, Duke Family Medicine and Duke Children’s Primary Care. And when you realize you’ve just scheduled your physical exam for the same time as your daughter’s ballet recital, just click the Cancel Appointment button and start over.

Advanced registration is also now available for many Duke clinics, so patients can fill out and update contact information prior to arriving for an appointment. That means a more efficient visit.

As an appointment day comes closer, patients receive e-mail reminders. Across the Private Diagnostic Clinic, said Rex McCallum, M.D., associate medical director, no-show rates are down 10 percent. Patients who use HealthView actually miss fewer appointments than those who aren’t signed up for the system.

That’s why physicians and clinic staff have actively encouraged patients to provide their e-mail addresses. Once a patient’s email address is entered into the HealthView system, he or she can create an account and make use of the site. (HealthView is not used by Duke Medicine for marketing purposes, and won’t use patient e-mail addresses for messages unrelated to a person’s medical care.)

And, soon after an appointment, patients receive e-mail messages about any laboratory results that have been posted to a person’s account. Over the last year, patients viewed one million results, with more than 300,000 of those results reports annotated by providers in eBrowser to give patients clarity on what the results meant.

Most lab results are available to patients one to seven days after the test, though providers can make results available sooner. Lipid panel tests, for example, are available almost immediately, said McCallum, since patients who get these tests are usually familiar with them and already managing cholesterol levels. But, to comply with state and federal regulations, the results of some tests, such as HIV antibody tests, are blocked entirely from HealthView.

John Anderson, M.D., chief medical officer of Duke Primary Care, said that patients and providers uniformly like HealthView.

“Patients appreciate the transparency and efficiency that HealthView provides, and the physicians like the way HealthView empowers their patients to be more involved in managing their own health care,” he said.

Anderson and other Duke Medicine leaders are encouraging all employees to use and understand the portal, and to help patients see the value of the tools there. Posters and brochures promoting HealthView are prominently displayed now throughout DUHS clinics and waiting rooms.

“It’s good for the organization as a whole because it’s very patient centered and also gives us a competitive advantage in the marketplace,” said McCallum.

Nationally, electronic medical records and online health information vaults are seeing intense development, as stimulus money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, and products from Google and Microsoft, pour resources into the technologies.

Asif Ahmad, vice president and chief information officer, points to the future of HealthView, which will include e-visits and secure communications between patients and their health care providers.

“With HealthView, Duke Medicine has an innovative suite of tools that puts patients in control of their health care information,” said Ahmad.