Patient Engagement

The New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC) has announced that Mana Health, a New York City-based health IT start-up, was awarded the vendor contract to build the Patient Portal for New Yorkers. The portal is a website through which New Yorkers will be able to access their healthcare records safely and securely online.

A recent online consumer survey found that electronic medical records (EMRs) are an important factor in patient satisfaction with their doctors, as well as their choice of healthcare providers. The survey was conducted by Deerfield, Ill.-based Aeffect, Inc., a research and consulting firm, and 88 Brand Partners, a marketing firm in Chicago.

For this month’s cover story package, Healthcare Informatics Editor-in-Chief, Mark Hagland and Associate Editor, Gabriel Perna, teamed up to write a pair of pieces on the impact of mobile health (mHealth) is having on both the patient and provider side of the spectrum. In this podcast, the two editors discuss what they both found throughout the process of writing these articles and surmise where mobility is headed in healthcare within the next few years.

Researchers at the University of Notre Dame have developed a computer-aided method that uses electronic health records (EHRs) to assess personalized disease risk and well-being.

Strong relationships with physicians, particularly those that are long standing, are likely to increase patients' openness to talk about health care costs when decisions are being made about their treatment options, according to a study from the National Institutes of Health. Rushed visits with insufficient time to talk about important issues can undermine efforts to bring sensitive topics like costs into the doctor-patient relationship and can be counter-productive. The work appears online in the Journal of General Medicine.