Discussion: Healthcare Information Technology Trends

Discussion: Healthcare Information Technology Trends

Great post! I feel that all of your discussion points are current trends within healthcare and can lead to many positive patient outcomes. Having patient portals to access all appointment information, labs, and to be able to communicate with the physician is involving the patient in their care and can lead to increased compliance and accountability for their healthcare. Interviews with patients who have used patient portals identified greater access to communication, reassurance, sense of control, and convenience as key benefits of patient portals (Janssen, et al., 2021). Within the patient portal accessing provider notes via OpenNotes can lead to creation of providers creating holistic plans of care and patient accessing pertinent information in their care, but I feel is potential threat to providers if the patient feels that they were mistreated or diagnosed inappropriately. Current concerns are that mental health clinicians are apprehensive that OpenNotes could cause significant harms to the therapeutic relationship, increase time spent writing and discussing notes with patients, enhance vulnerability to lawsuits or patient retaliation, and increase patient worry or sense of stigma (Pisciotta et al., 2019). Providers have the ability to block access if they feel that the information can be harmful in any manner.

Resources

Janssen, A., Keep, M., Selvadurai, H., Kench, A., Hunt, S., Simonds, S., Marshall, T.,

Hatton, L., Dalla-Pozza, L., McCullagh, C., & Shaw, T. (2021). Factors That Influence Use of a Patient Portal by Health Professionals. International Journal of Envi