NWPHO To Launch Patient Gateway Portal

Beginning in CY2010, the NWPHO will begin to roll out Patient Gateway, an online application that allows patients to interact and communicate with their healthcare providers and their medical records. Patient Gateway is integrated with the Partners Longitudinal Medical Record (LMR) and allows patients to have secure access to certain components of their LMR record and to communicate in a secure, HIPAA compliant manner with the practice staff and their providers (if chosen by the provider).

View Patient Gateway Screen Captures (pdf)

Using Gateway, patients will be able to view their medication list, allergy list, immunization record, and all lab and radiology results. Patients do not have access to their provider’s visit notes. In addition, for practices that have interfaced their scheduling system with the LMR, patients will be able to see past and future appointments and the office will be able to send electronic patient visit reminders. Providers can also send patient letters with test results using the system and monitor if patients have “picked up” the result from the system.

All patient communication with the office takes place behind a secure firewall and offices can triage incoming patient communication such as referral requests, medication refill request, and appointment requests to the appropriate staff members. As indicated above, providers will have the option of having patients communicate directly with them via Gateway assuming the provider has chosen to activate this functionality.

Implementation of this patient portal is one of our pay-for-performance measures in CY2010 and NWPHO must deploy the system with 25% of our LMR users by the end this calendar year. Please view the attached PowerPoint presentation for more information on the capabilities of this system. If you practice is interested in being an early adopter of this new system, please contact Mary Huck, LMR Project Manager by email or at 617-243-5854.