St. John Providence Chooses Intuit Health Patient Portal

St. John Providence Health System, a 3,200-provider health system serving  metro Detroit, has selected Intuit Health, the nation's leader in patient-to-provider communication systems, to provide its physician practices with a patient portal.

With the Intuit Health Patient Portal, employed and private practices can now connect with data from multiple electronic health record and practice management systems to offer patients a single view of data for their personal health record.

Intuit Health currently has integration capability with many leading healthcare IT companies including Allscripts, GE, Greenway, Medicity, and NextGen.

"The interoperability of the Intuit Health portal is one of our biggest competitive differentiators," said Steve Malik, president and general manager of Intuit Health. "Because St. John Providence Health providers already use many of these systems, helping them connect and gather data from multiple sources and different vendors will make it easy for them to create a single view of their patients' personal health record. This is a great experience for both the patient and the practice."

St. John Providence Health System, part of Ascension Health, the nation's largest Catholic non-profit health system, is one of the first health systems working to establish a unified portal network across its provider base.

"The ability to interact online directly with our patients allows us to communicate with them effectively and timely, as well as providing the efficiency and accuracy of communication that helps both the patient and the provider," said Vincent DiBattista, senior vice president of physician services for St. John Providence Health System.

Intuit Health's patient portal currently enables more than 3.5 million patients nationwide to easily and securely communicate with 33,000 providers online. Patients and their doctors use the portal more than 150,000 times each day to pre-register, request appointments and prescription refills, understand and pay bills, complete medical forms, receive lab results and clinical summaries, conduct virtual office visits, and exchange messages for related care and administrative issues.

"The ability to send lab and radiology information to patients and to avoid frequent telephone tag makes the patient portal a valuable instrument in the physician toolkit. Certain communications still require real-time phone conversation or face to face office visits, but the ability to process the day's work at a more convenient time has proven very beneficial," said Ken Bollin, M.D. at St. John Family Medical Center.

Americans increasingly want greater online access to their doctor. A 2011 Intuit Health survey showed that 73 percent of patients would use a secure online solution to communicate with their doctor, request appointments, get lab results, and pay their medical bill online. Additionally, 81 percent said they would fill out their medical forms online prior to their doctor's appointment if they had the option. The convenience of anytime, anywhere access is so important that almost half would consider switching doctors for a practice that offered the ability to communicate and complete important health care tasks online.

More at www.stjohnprovidence.org or www.intuithealth.com.