My Health at Vanderbilt (MHAV) is an online software application that lets patients interact with their electronic medical records, communicate securely with their health care team and pay medical bills electronically.
On Nov. 2, MHAV will undergo a major upgrade, providing users with a range of new features, several of which are designed to ease patient access to Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC).
The MHAV upgrade coincides with EpicLeap — the replacement of the greater part of VUMC’s clinical, administrative and billing software.
“We’re very excited about these changes,” said MHAV Director Trent Rosenbloom, M.D., MPH, associate professor of Biomedical Informatics, Medicine and Pediatrics.
The changes include:
• Patients will be able to schedule, reschedule and cancel clinic appointments and add themselves to clinic waiting lists. This will start in selected clinics for clinicians with whom the patient already has a relationship, and eventually will spread to more clinics and to clinicians who haven’t previously seen the patient.
• Starting 24 hours before a clinic appointment, patients will be able to check in online and complete patient intake forms.
• Patients and their caregivers will find it much easier to create a MHAV account. People will still be able to register in person at Vanderbilt, but beginning Nov. 2 prospective users will have the option to use third-party authentication tools, from directly within MHAV, to confirm their identity and complete system registration online from home.
“This will make it easier for new patients to schedule appointments, fill out pre-visit questionnaires and communicate with clinic offices,” said Brian Carlson, director of Patient Experience and Access.
• Patients will be able to update their lists of medications, diagnoses, allergies and other MHAV information. These updates will be subject to review by a clinician before appearing in electronic medical records.
“We’d like to think the updates would lead to a conversation with the patient, such as ‘why did you stop taking this medication? What’s the story behind this new diagnosis?’” Rosenbloom said.
Two short-lived issues arising from the Nov. 2 software switch are the subject of forthcoming notification and education for users, clinicians and care teams.
• Over the days leading to the software switch, patients and their clinical teams will be asked to limit use of MHAV messaging to only the most pressing matters. After Nov. 2, users of the new medical record system won’t be able to interact as easily with MHAV messages sent before that date. Messages sent after the Nov. 2 upgrade will function normally.
• Patients will be advised to print out their MHAV medication lists before the Nov. 2 switch. Medication lists will transfer automatically to the new medical record system, but not to the new MHAV; before a medication list is posted to the new MHAV, it will need to be reviewed and reconciled by a clinician.
“We anticipate that the medication lists of patients who come often for care will get reconciled quickly, while medications of patients not seen often will get reconciled on an as-needed basis,” Rosenbloom said, adding that patients can at any time contact the care team to request that their medication list be reconciled.
Last year there were 3.7 million MHAV logons from more than 167,000 users. According to Rosenbloom, approximately one in three patients that Vanderbilt interacts with uses MHAV, and in several clinics the adoption rate is above 75 percent.
“We want to engage every patient through My Health at Vanderbilt, but most of all we want to engage people who come here for chronic care, for cancer care, for complex surgery. That’s where we really get value engaging people in the health care process,” Rosenbloom said.
For more information about EpicLeap and the Nov. 2 Go Live, see the project website here.
