Ophthalmology Patient Portal and Online Communication Editorial

Portalis Ubiquitous*

January 1, 2012

Internet portals are everywhere! Just yesterday, New Year's Eve, I purchased a book from Amazon and selected a continuing medical education course, updated my Netflix instant viewing queue and most notably establish a secure account on the US Treasury's portal, TreasuryDirect, to purchase I series savings bonds. I was able to do this all from the comfort of my internet browser. And this was all before lunch! I still had time to make a dinner reservation, order a pizza, or check on my dog's blood results all on a potpourri of increasingly ubiquitous portals.

What's going on?

What's going on with all of these purveyors of goods and services and using portals? The answer is that firms from all industries are incessantly driven to reduce transaction costs. And they are accomplishing impressive results by allowing self service for routine and increasingly more complicated and sensitive tasks with portals. These portals also increase sales by increasing access and convenience to those

 Paul C. Seel, MD, MBA
 Vice President & Medical
 Director
 
 Sophrona Solutions
 Minneapolis, MN

goods and services. What's more, the mobile internet and smart phones will enable previously unimaginable opportunities and access.

Some impressive results

This unremitting drive to decrease transaction costs through the use of self service portals has produced some impressive results from some unlikely players. One of the benefits of portals is reducing paper forms and repeatedly entering the same data, over and over again. Remember paper airline tickets? The US airline industry saves an estimated $3 billion annually having eliminated these relics. Flyers book flights and check in on-line. No need for paper to get in the way. Another innovative example comes from the US government. By enabling the purchase of I series US savings bonds electronically, over a portal, the US Treasury will save $400 million over the next five years. The Treasury's experience follows an equally impressive Internal Revenue Service initiative to eliminate paper tax returns. These success stories at the Treasury have not been missed by the folks at Health and Human Services (HHS) and Medicare.

It's not just paper and ink

Paper and ink are only minor contributors to transaction costs. It's managing and moving the paper that escalates the cost. And it's implementing data systems that eliminate paper that trim costs. Let's look at the efficiencies of the Treasury's elimination of paper savings bonds. Instead of going to the bank and filling out a paper form which then required someone to enter that data, I logged on securely to TreasuryDirect and keyed in my own info. My payment for the savings bond was made directly from my bank account at Wells Fargo to the Treasury. In the future, I will monitor and eventually redeem my bond holdings on-line with the proceeds returning electronically to my account. No trip to the bank; no bank clerk involvement and no inventory of paper forms to maintain at the bank. No mailing of forms to the Treasury or paper bonds back to me or repeating the entire process in reverse for redemption. You get the picture. Expense is reduced with each eliminated step. And because every person touching my transaction had an opportunity to transpose digits or use the wrong form or screw it up some other way, the risk and cost of undoing those errors was also eliminated.

Bringing it all home

So what does all of this have to do with running an ophthalmology practice? Meaningful Use requires managing and distributing information to your patients in the form of clinic summaries, educational material and health summaries; the more paper, the more staff time, the more errors, the more cost. Patient portals are the entry point for paperless data collection and paperless self service and then paperless distribution of information back to the patients. Eliminate the paper at these touch points and you eliminate the much greater cost of managing that paper. And as I mentioned previously, HHS has seen how these IT measures can reduce cost. They no doubt had these innovations in mind when they developed the regulations for Meaningful Use.

Happy New Year!

*Sophrona Brand Police couldn’t let this title go through without a formal Latin review. The correct form of the expression should be ‘Porta ubique praesens’ but did not have the same marketing ring.