Use of My Health site continues growing strong
My Health at Vanderbilt, the Medical Center's innovative patient Web portal, continues to experience explosive growth in terms of numbers of new users who sign up each month and the number of patients who use the site daily.
My Health now has more than 77,000 registered users and each month nearly 1,300 new users sign up. The Web portal currently averages 3,200 users per day, and on peak days there are more than 5,000 users accessing the site.
“More and more of our patients are taking advantage of My Health at Vanderbilt and prefer this manner of electronic communication for their needs rather than the telephone,” said Sue Muse, project administrator for My Health at Vanderbilt. “Feedback from our patients has been overwhelmingly positive. My Health is transforming the provider and patient relationship at Vanderbilt.”
This leading-edge Web portal continues to be a successful tool for Vanderbilt patients to actively participate in the management of their own health via easy access to the latest information on health conditions, view lab test results, read radiology reports, schedule clinic appointments, pay bills and message their physicians. It is also continuing to evolve and add new features.
“We are taking our prevention and disease management dashboards and revamping these concepts to alert patients automatically when they may have a gap in care,” said Jim Jirjis, M.D., M.B.A., director of Adult Primary Care, chief medical information officer for outpatient clinics and project chair for My Health at Vanderbilt.
“In addition, we are exploring or actively developing capabilities for online visits, patient self-management tools, patient-centered medication reminders and a host of other new ways to use MyHealth at Vanderbilt to empower patients and the provider-patient relationship.”
“The redesign will allow patients to request necessary preventive testing or vaccinations in order to meet patient care quality goals which are designed to prevent illness. We are also exploring and developing a potential interface with third-party personal health record (PHR), Google Health for instance, for patients who choose to use both My Health and such a third-party PHR.”
Now in its sixth year, My Health remains at the forefront of patient Web-based portals developed and used by academic medical centers. Only recently have a handful of other major academic medical centers begun to develop or deploy similar tools intended to better engage patients in their own health management.
“We have increasingly become a source of information for medical organizations that are exploring developing or adopting their own patient Web portal,” Jirjis said. “It is clear that we have one of the most well adopted, robust provider-tethered patient Web portals in the country. We are one of the few, if not only, large enterprises to develop a version for the pediatric population.”
For more information or to register as a user of My Health at Vanderbilt please visit www.myhealthatvanderbilt.com.