Digitalization has been transforming many industries. Healthcare, for instance, has been on the frontline, adopting digitalized solutions to streamline workflows and related tasks. Today, it is easy for doctors and medical practitioners to connect with patients through scheduled online appointments and complete their requirements in a seamless manner using a healthcare app or a medical portal.

A patient portal, for instance, is a trending solution in the healthcare field that enhances efficiency, streamlining communications, and facilitating smooth workflows in healthcare sectors. The stakeholders can carry out their processes and tasks in a smooth manner, guaranteeing efficiency and a cost-effective software solution. This guide describes all the insights you need to know about patient portals, the core features, and how to develop such a system, the costs of developing a patient portal, among many other insights.

What is a patient portal system?

A patient portal is a solid and reliable online platform available 24/7 where patients can complete diverse actions such as communicating with healthcare providers, managing their health details, and any other related activity. Medical practitioners, too, benefit from such a platform since they can examine their patients from remote areas and suggest appropriate actions or medicine. This creates a healthy community with people embracing healthy living habits and managing chronic illness swiftly.

Through such a platform, users can access their medical results, process payments online, get prescription refills, and schedule doctor appointments, among many other tasks. This streamlines the operations between healthcare providers and patients.

Types of patient portals

There are three types of patient portals that perform diverse functionalities to ease healthcare tasks and related processes. These portals include the following:

Integrated Patient Portal– This is a system made up of EMR, EHR systems, and practice management software. It comes with integrated components for streamlined operations while saving on costs. You don’t need to pay or incur extra costs for a custom made patient portal system.

Although you will save some costs since this type of patient portal comes with integrated systems, the development costs can be higher because of the more time and effort needed to dedicate to the development process, plus the complexity that comes with such designs. Athena health is a perfect example of an integrated patient portal.

Standalone Patient Portal – this is the exact opposite of the integrated patient portal. It doesn’t require external software to operate. In this case, when you need another system, let’s say EHR, for instance, you will have to perform manual integration. This means paying extra costs for the integration processes. What’s more, you will need to modify the system to align with the made changes, hence more work and effort.

However, developing a standalone patient portal is less costly, plus it requires a shorter development timeline. While an integrated patient portal seems beneficial in many aspects, an entrepreneur could opt for a standalone patient portal system just to avoid issues with non-user-friendly integrations, plus provider excess costs and frustrations.

Solutionreach is a perfect example of a standalone patient portal system.

PHR – Personal Health Record– just like its name, this is a patient portal that is solely handled by the patients. The users (patients) take charge of their health data and can opt to share it with the required party, be it family members or medical practitioners.

How patients manage their data through the PHR is what distinguishes it from the standalone patient portal. Other parties can only view patient data records upon approval from the relevant users.

Other activities that patients can process include correcting inaccurate billing details, sharing their health status, and tracking their overall progress.

Why you need a patient’s portal

A patient portal, apart from just streamlining workflows and processes, comes with many benefits, both to patients and medical service providers. Below are some of the top benefits of such a platform:

• Resource optimization

The features included in a patient portal play a big role in cutting down costs in one way or the other, hence achieving resource optimization. Telehealth and health tracking features, for instance, cut off the need to visit hospitals physically, hence using the doctor’s available time effectively. Other activities such as patient scheduling, online payments, and self-check-ins reduce the staff needed, hence streamlining automation processes, enhanced time management, and better patient care.

• Better healthcare

Thanks to patient portals, people can now embrace healthy living standards. Prescription refills and e-prescriptions, for instance, guide patients on following medication requirements while encouraging self-care practices among the portal users.

This, in turn, enhances healthy living habits, reduces hospital visits, and prolongs life expectancy.

• Enhanced patient engagement

Through the portal’s features, such as educative content and chatbots, patients can stay active and fully engaged with their medical service providers. Besides, the portal enables users to track their healthcare information and updates, thus guaranteeing transparency in handling healthcare processes.

• Reduced costs

Using the patient portal reduces associated costs significantly. Patients don’t need to stay for days in the hospitals. Instead, they can use the portal, connect with their service providers, and save more money.

What’s more, the treatment costs, facility management costs, labor costs, and supply & administrative costs are reduced significantly with a patient portal in place.

• Saves time

Patient portals help users save time when processing or completing their actions. It is just a matter of a few clicks, and it is done. This saves both the patient’s and office staff’s work. Besides, you don’t need to spend hours in the waiting room to be attended to when using a patient portal. With just a few clicks or a quick call, you have your issue resolved in a matter of minutes.

• Faster communication

Streamlined communication is key, especially in the medical field. A patient portal enables a patient to access their personal information faster and share it with the required party for appropriate action. In fact, such a portal becomes of great significance when in urgent or quick need of medical attention.

Must-have features of a patient portal system

The following features are what make a patient portal fully functional with streamlined workflows and processes:

• Patient Registration

This feature helps new users or rather patients to enter their details into the patient portal and create the respective accounts they will be using to access the portal.

As a way of reinforcing roust security for patient’s data, you will need to put in place secure protection measures, including the use of biometrics.

Also, include smart features that streamline the registration process for users with special needs. This ensures you create a portal that accommodates all types of users. With the registration process complete, the users (patients) can confirm and manage their data for the needed actions.

• User Profiles

User profiles are crucial in a complex patient portal system. It helps secure patient data and ensure the right access of patient’s data while maintaining confidentiality where needed.

What’s more, users should access their profiles easily when they need to complete some processes and perform some actions.

• Secure billing and payment

Patients need a smooth process of managing and processing their bills and expenses in relation to medical services they get via patient portals. In this case, include a secure payment gateway system to facilitate the processes. Make sure the payment system advocates for transparency and enables users to track their overall bills, expenses, and insurance coverage.

• Comprehensive user dashboard

The patient account, or rather user profiles, need a detailed and easy to navigate through dashboard for filling and accessing the portal’s services. Through such a dashboard, users can access anything they want, be it their medical results, scheduled appointments, diets to follow, and any other related activities.

Some of the core details that should be included on the portal dashboard include the following:

• Access to medical data such as test results, health records, vaccinations, and examinations, among many others.
• Filling or editing personal data
• Setting up account preferences, such as privacy and notification settings
• Access to other key data such as billing, scheduled appointments, and prescription refills, among others.

• Chats and Chatbots

Chats and Chatbots a key features in a patient portal as they facilitate personalized service delivery to the portal users.

In this case, include a live chat feature or a robust chatbot that will keep users engaged throughout, especially when addressing common questions or arising issues when a human operator isn’t accessible.

• Medical Appointment Scheduling

This is a feature that allows portal users to plan and schedule their appointments with their respective medical practitioners.

In this case, a patient can easily review the doctor’s availability through the portal, check the open slots and timelines, and review any key information in regard to their health requirements. Once the patient conforms to all the details, they can seamlessly schedule their appointments and do a follow-up later.

• Telehealth

Both doctors and patients using the portal will require a telehealth feature to connect then via video or chat consultation. In short, a telehealth feature facilitates seamless communication between the patient and doctors, ensuring accuracy and timely communication, thus eliminating the need to visit the healthcare facility physically.

• Personalized content

Personalized and educative content is also a key feature to include in a patient portal. The content targets users with specific conditions, and they can get insights through videos, tutorials, and written blogs as guidelines for managing their conditions.

Apart from educating users, such content keeps users engaged and interacting with the portal actively.

How to develop a patient portal

Developing a patient portal is a complex process that requires proper planning and following of the steps as outlined below:

• Know the objectives and collect requirements

Start the process by defining why you need a patient portal. This will guide you in deciding the type of patient portal to focus on. For instance, do you want to simply the process of accessing medical records, do you want to streamline admin processes, or do you want to enhance user engagement? These are among the many objectives you can have in mind when building a patient portal.

Once you know why you need a patient portal, reach out to other parties involved and collect the insights and requirements that will help you achieve and actualize your vision. Defining the type of patient portal you need to build will help you know the features and functionalities to include to satisfy all user’s requirements.

• Highlight the core features

With the guidelines you have from the first step, you now need to highlight all the core features that will facilitate the proper functionality of your patient portal. This step is important in that it will ensure you don’t miss out on any relevant features that can impact your patient portal in the later stages.

What’s more, make sure you prioritize the most important features, as this impacts the costs and complexity of developing such a platform. Don’t forget to highlight the core features based on user preferences & requirements, compliance & industry guidelines, and overall impact on patient wellbeing.

With the core features well-defined, you can now move to the next step.

• Select the ideal technology stack

With the objectives and features, you want to integrate into your patient portal, choose the tech stack that will enable you to complete the process well, factoring in the costs, access to experts in the specific healthcare tech stack, customization, scalability, and deployment timelines, among many other factors.

In this case, review different tech stacks available, considering security levels, compatibility with other systems, overall costs, and scalability.

Examples of technologies you can consider in this case include mobile-responsive design, cloud-based services, and ease of integration with other systems.

• UX design

Next, design and develop a user-friendly design, factoring in the possible challenges, user preferences, and user requirements. These guidelines will help you create a UX that aligns with diverse user groups since different patients have different medical requirements.

Stat with the wireframes to create the structure, then prototypes for simplified layouts. Before you move to the next step, do usability testing to verify the feasibility of the design using different user groups. Use the insights collected and modify the UX design where necessary.

• Patient portal system development

This next step is where the actual patient portal development happens. You will use the details from the previous stages and let a software development company like Aalpha Information System, take charge of all the processes.

Consider developing an MVP for the patient portal first with the core features, then collect user feedback and adjust where necessary. An MVP helps you tailor the system to penetrate the market easily without incurring extra costs in the later stages after deployment.

Backend and frontend development are the major tasks involved in developing a patient portal, not forgetting to comply with GDPR and HIPAA set rules and guidelines.

Depending on the platform you need to focus on (web, Android, or iOS), the development team will advise on the appropriate tools and resources to actualize the project at hand. When developing a patient portal, use different apps to reach different needs of different users.

• Testing the patient portal app

With the patient portal development process complete, you need to ensure the system functions and performs well, hence the need for proper testing. Besides, you need to ensure the system aligns with the set industry guidelines, plus proper data security measures are put in place. The testing tasks covered in this phase include the following:

• Unit & integration testing to ensure all the integrations are perfect, plus the entire system performs as anticipated
• Security testing to ensure the portal meets the set security and industry guidelines
• Accessibility testing to ensure the systems meet all user’s needs, including those with special needs.
• Functional testing to ensure the system meets what users need plus it operates as anticipated
• Performance & usability testing to ensure the system is highly responsive and easily accessible under different instances.

Generally, the testing process is a continuous one where you identify and resolve any issues and bugs, ensuring the system is stable enough for launching.

Well, testing such a system can be complex and costly. However, you can outsource software testing services from Aalpha Information Systems, for professional services and to save on costs and time.

• Deployment and maintenance

At this point, you have your patient portal in place with all the required features and functionalities. You can now launch or deploy the system and make it available to users. However, you need to keep tracking the system’s performance, collecting user feedback, and adjusting the system where necessary to make it viable in the market.

• Staff training staff and regular support

Finally, you need to let the patient portal’s users familiarize themselves with the system and know the features and advantages of using such a system. The guidelines you give will help the staff use the portal well and simplify their operations in many ways.

Most importantly, have a technical team that will take charge of any arising technical hiccups and resolve them in a timely manner.

Expert tips for building a patient portal successfully

When developing a patient portal system, always remember to factor in the following elements to create a secure, compliance, and reliable patient portal system:

• Compliance rules and guidelines

The healthcare industry is guided by strict rules and guidelines. In this case, when developing a healthcare app, be it a telehealth app, a patient portal, or an EHR system, make sure you understand the set rules and guidelines and follow them promptly. GDPR, PIPEDA, HITECH Act, and HIPAA are just examples of the set guidelines to follow when creating healthcare apps.

• Personalization

A patient portal serves diverse users with diverse needs and interests. In this case, make sure you tailor your patient portal with different user needs in mind. This means the content and services you include should touch on diverse user groups. Again, you can suggest individual users and recommend specific services according to what a specific user interacts with most.

• Concentrate on inclusivity and user-centered design

Not all patient portal users can access the system seamlessly. Some have physical limitations, while some lack technical skills. In this case, you need to consider this in the early stages of patient portal development.

Create the design with user needs in mind. This means you must understand your audience and include features that will meet their unique requirements. Examples of these inclusivity and user-centered designs include language localization, typeface & font size adjustment, screen magnifier, and text-to-speech, among many others.

• Do a competitor analysis

You will always have competitors offering the same or more services as you, and this can impact your patient portal acceptance in the market. That is why you should always evaluate your competitors keenly, define their dealings and strategies, and point out their weaknesses. With insights collected, you will know the missing gaps your competitors haven’t covered and invest the resources you have to beat your competitors in the market.

The cost to develop a patient portal

The costs of developing a patient portal vary depending on the system’s complexity, integrations needed, system design, type of development team, and the platform used, among many other factors.

With this said the costs of building a patient portal can range from $1000 to $30000 or even more depending on the factors described herein.

The best part of it is that you can use the following tips to reduce the costs of developing a patient portal:

• Outsourcing the development team from Aalpha Information Systems
• Prioritizing core features
• Building a scalable patient portal
• Creating a comprehensive development plan
• Building an MVP first, among many other tips.

Conclusion

A patient portal is a system that is streamlining operations in the healthcare sector. Building such a platform comes with diverse benefits and challenges as well. Employees get to enjoy personalized healthcare services plus seamless access to medical services from experts across the globe.

However, challenges such as data security, health literacy, communication challenges, social determinants of health, technical challenges, and limited internet access will always arise. Nonetheless, proper planning and implementation can help you overcome these challenges and build a robust, secure, and reliable patient portal that will serve users with different interests and capacities.

Back to You!

Want to develop a patient portal to ease your work? Aalpha Information Systems, a leading healthcare development company, is the right choice to create a patient portal tailored to your needs. Connect with us now!