Patient engagement is a necessary element for the achievement of a better quality of care and it is a critical component of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) initiative to focus on the quality of care.  CMS programs like the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, MACRA, are fundamentally changing the reimbursement matrix […]

Updated on June 5, 2020. Given the growing interest in video conferencing services for communicating with patients online, healthcare organizations often come to Bridge Patient Portal, a patient engagement vendor, with questions about the use of Skype® for telemedicine, and is Skype HIPAA Compliant? Here we will focus on two “types” of Skype: Consumer Skype® […]

Sending automated medical appointment reminders has been shown to decrease appointment “no shows” and has a potential to enhance the patient-provider relationship.  However, given the concern about data breaches, automated appointment reminders remain an underutilized feature of patient portals.  According to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, appointment reminders are allowed under the […]

By engaging patients and encouraging participation in their healthcare, organizations can ensure a greater number of health goals are met. Of course, patient engagement can be a challenge, but a successful plan starts with a realistic goal. Do you know what percent of patients your organization should initially attempt to engage through a patient engagement […]

More and more health organizations are implementing publicly-exposed web technologies containing Protected Health Information (PHI) which are subject to the laws of HIPAA. Common examples of such systems include Electronic Health Record (EHR), web portal, Patient Portal and mHealth solutions. When those systems become integrated, PHI must travel from one platform to the other – […]

With the MIPS reporting period deadlines just around the corner, we at Bridge Patient Portal are seeing a surge in attention being directed towards the MACRA program as patient portals make up an important part of MIPS scoring. While the MACRA program already began at the start of 2017 many still find themselves confused by […]

As more healthcare providers begin to use email and text (SMS) messaging to communicate with patients, concerns about the HIPAA Security Rule and how it applies to electronic messaging have increased as much as the confusion has. HIPAA law makes very few specific statements about what is and isn’t acceptable when it comes to electronic […]

For more than a decade, healthcare institutions have been using electronic health records (EHRs), as well as standardized templates for files containing medical information, in order to share data electronically.  By 2011, the number of physicians using EHR systems had grown to 57% – and since then, with the introduction of the federal government’s EHR […]

It pays to keep patients happy, and many certified patient portal vendors just aren’t cutting it. While this is mostly the result of software vendors focusing solely on Meaningful Use/MACRA requirements, it also has to do with vendors not investing sufficient resources in research and development (R&D), and in simply making band-aid fixes instead of […]

  Interoperability is necessary for the attainment of a more efficient healthcare system and the use of HIEs. It puts important patient data at physicians’ fingertips, allowing for more informed decision-making and better continuity of care. Interoperability is on the rise, spurred by government efforts to increase health information exchange; however, barriers by EHR vendors […]