Patient Relationship Management Taking on the Patient Portal and PHR

The other day I had the chance to get a demo of Avado‘s PRM (Patient Relationship Management) system from Dave Chase. I’d seen a lot of the writings of Dave Chase throughout the internet. He’s been really smart to go after a number of really high profile tech blogs to get some good exposure for Avado. This isn’t a good strategy for a lot of healthcare IT companies, but it can work really well for the right ones. Either way, I was fascinated by many of Dave Chase’s writings and so I knew it would be an interesting experience.

Needless to say, Dave Chase and Avado are looking at the physician patient relationship quite different from many others. At some point, I may do a full write up of the Avado service, but I think this slide that Dave Chase showed me summed up the comprehensive way that Avado looks at the physician patient relationship. Take a look at the comparison of Avado with a patient portal (I wish PHR was included in the chart as well):

I love companies that look at situations in a really comprehensive manner. Avado seems to be a company that does that. I think it’s still early to know if Avado will be able to execute on this comprehensive approach, but I think it’s a good starting point. Many who have looked at patient portals and PHR software in the past probably wondered why many of the things listed in the chart above weren’t features of the portal or PHR.

I must admit, my next idea for this list is to take it and see how the various PHR and portals handle each of the items on the list. Considering the new emphasis on the patient portal thanks to meaningful use stage 2, physicians might want to give a little extra thought into what the patient portal they adopt is able to do.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

4 Comments

  • This might be nice, I don’t know, but it seems to me it will be a challenge to get a doc to go with a PP that is not closely integrated with their EHR.

    As one who has dealt with a variety of EHRs and the “joy” of trying to connect various 3rd party packages to them…let’s just say it can be interesting.

    Though it may not be required, the ability to have a PP connect natively (API or directly) is huge. We are trying to centralize data here, and the lack of a connection to said EHR just complicates things.

    But heck, for all I know, they do connect directly to EHRs.

  • John,
    The patient portal’s success has usually been in its ability to connect to EHR software. It is a pain as you describe and that’s why many of my comments above were about EHR vendors creating portals with all these features.

    With that said, Avado’s team comes from Microsoft HealthVault where they did a lot of EHR integrations. So, they have that skill. They just haven’t gone that direction yet from what I understand.

  • John – Thanks for highlighting our work. There are a few items to clarify.
    1. Our dev team actually worked on MS’ Amalga project (now Caradigm) where they did a great deal of HL7 work. Personally, I founded MSFT’s health platform business. This is the money-making part of MS’ health business of getting 3rd parties to build their systems on top of MS’ platform.
    2. You said “I wish PHR was included in the chart as well” — we believe that the PHR terminology/concept has been limiting and use “Multi-provider Collaborative Health Record” (which is in the table). Hat tip to John Moore for the “Collaborative Health Record” terminology/concept which we like.
    3. Wrt EHR integration, that is a HUGE focus of ours. We are opening up Avado more broadly this week and one of the 2 primary messages we hope to get out there is we want to partner with EHR vendors. Some of the big guys will continue to perpetuate the silo’ization of healthcare and prefer to lock-in customers but the forward-looking EHR vendors realize being open to 3rd party patient portals and relationship management systems will ultimately allow them to serve a broader market. We hope to help the forward-looking EHR vendors leapfrog over the proprietary model that still persists.

    In absence of the direct integration with EHR vendor systems (the preferred model), we will support the Direct protocol and will be able to ingest the clinical summaries and continuity of care documentation required to be pushed out of EHRs. The good news for providers is the release this week will allow them to pair the certified EHR with our system to address the Patient Engagement facets of Stage 2 Meaningful Use (i.e., most of the new items) with less than 30 minutes of effort and limited or no cost (depends on practice size).

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