e-Talking to Patients: Connecting with the Health Care Consumer

In the Jan/Feb 2006 issue of JAMIA, Weingart et al., in their article, “Who uses the patient Internet portal? The PatientSite experience,” offer an interesting perspective on the implementation of a patient portal called PatientSite. They describe the results of patient access to the features of the system and the demographic and clinical profile of its enrollees. Furthermore, this is one of the first steps in exploring and assessing the utility of patient portals and the value of its services in health care management, which the authors have pertinently described in the current paper. Similar to the tool developed by informaticists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), which the authors have used enabling patients to enroll in a portal, the Cleveland Clinic Health System implemented the physician portal with features exclusive to physician access termed as My Chart in a multispecialty academic setting. Our experiences regarding the pivotal role of this e-health component in improving patient care, patient-provider satisfaction within the clinic operations has been impressive.