Our My Health Online patient portal (web and mobile app) helps patients manage their own and their family’s health information, schedule appointments, renew prescriptions, send messages to their care team, check in for their appointment and much more.
Sutter Health was the first organization in the world to implement Epic Systems Corporation’s MyChart digital patient portal. A study of the early experience with the patient portal indicated that patients ranked the ability to message their clinicians, viewing test results, and viewing data stored in the electronic health record as the most important features to patients. We shared some of our steps to support high patient portal adoption, including deploying key patient-requested features and building a dedicated patient service center dedicated to My Health Online support 12 hours a day. (Tai-Seale et al, 2019) We have demonstrated many positive clinical benefits such as increased adherence to guideline-concordant reminders of patients with diabetes (Panattoni et al, 2018) and significant improvement in glycemic control in an online diabetes management delivered via the portal (Tang et al, 2013). We have also studied the unintended consequences of patient portal implementation including substantial time spent by clinicians on desktop medicine inclusive of time required to respond to secure patient messages (Tai-Seale et al, 2017).
Today, Sutter Health’s My Health Online has over 5 million portal logins per month, with over 700,000 unique users per month.
