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CASE STUDY

Tidewater Physician Multispecialty Group Reduces Staff Workload & Increases Patient Satisfaction with InteliChart's Patient Portal

Tidewater Physician Multispecialty Group Selects InteliChart’s Patient Portal

Company Background

Tidewater Physicians Multispecialty Group (TPMG) is a network of 220 providers across 85 office locations in southeastern Virginia using the Nextgen EHR and EPM systems.

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Established 1992

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85 Locations

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220+ Providers

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30+ Specialties

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Challenges

Tidewater’s previous patient portal was not user-friendly and adoption was low. Their Help Desk and community sites were receiving numerous calls a day from patients having trouble accessing the portal. Negative social media posts echoed patient dissatisfaction with their previous portal.

Solution

Tidewater selected InteliChart’s Patient Portal in May of 2020.

Our Patient Portal is smart, consumer-friendly, and aesthetically pleasing – we’ve established a new standard for portal technology. Because our portal is part of our broader Healthy Outcomes engagement platform, it acts as a hub that organizes all your patients’ healthcare activity in one convenient location.

The solutions on InteliChart’s Healthy Outcomes patient engagement platform work in unison to deliver a cohesive, orchestrated experience for patients and healthcare providers.

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“With InteliChart’s Patient Portal, data comes right over in real-time through their comprehensive API, and their deep integration with our Nextgen EHR has streamlined our workflows immensely.” - Hope Owens, Director of Systems Implementation and Support

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Results:

Help Desk tickets decreased significantly, reducing staff workload. Patient satisfaction and portal adoption increased. Features that improved physician practice workflow efficiencies included built-in enterprise capabilities, real-time data exchange, and the ability for practice users to see the same portal view that patients see.

Switching portals can seem daunting, but with the significant impact they have on patient engagement, it is essential to have the right one. Engaged patients are more likely to adhere to care plans, driving better outcomes that help providers succeed in an environment of healthcare consumerism and support value-based care goals.

Tidewater Physician Multispecialty Group found that the benefits of making the change from their legacy portal to InteliChart’s Patient Portal were well worth the effort.

Reduced Staff Workload

“The primary reason we are so glad we chose InteliChart is the decrease in the number of problems patients have with their portal,” said Owens.

“With our previous portal, the Help Desk was getting six or seven tickets a day related to patients having trouble getting into the portal – and that’s not including the number of issues our community sites were handling themselves.

Now with InteliChart’s Patient Portal, we have maybe one or two a month. That significantly reduces work for our staff and makes our patients a whole lot happier!”

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From Cumbersome to Simple

Before transitioning to InteliChart, Tidewater patients had to go through a cumbersome process to download their chart, making it difficult for them to access the information they needed for continuity of care.

“InteliChart’s Patient Portal is intuitive, user-friendly and it’s easy for patients to download their chart,” explains Owens.

Tidewater also noted the simplicity InteliChart brought to several other functions.

“Deactivating a user now takes one click as opposed to the numerous steps it took before,” said Owens. “Creating message groups is much easier now and so is adding a provider to the portal and building their bio.”

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Enterprise Capabilities

“Another obstacle we encountered with our last portal was if a patient was registered in the same EHR as Tidewater’s but at a different practice, it was very difficult for them to merge charts together. They had to go through a multi-step process that required logging in, multi-factor identification, and an e-mail code,” recalls Owens.

“The process frequently resulted in patients being locked out of their account. They’d have to call the EHR vendor and wait for a rep to get back to them. Patients want to get into their charts immediately - they don’t want to wait days for a return call. This frustration with our previous portal even led patients to blast us on social media.”

InteliChart’s Patient Portal has built-in enterprise capabilities that make it easy for patients to transfer records from one physician to another and merge different practice charts together.

“With InteliChart’s Patient Portal, data comes right over in real-time through their comprehensive API and their deep integration with our Nextgen EHR has streamlined our workflows immensely.”

Training, Support and Enhancement Requests

InteliChart’s Patient Portal implementation is a six-to-eight week process, depending on the approach clients choose and the size of their organization.

“We were very impressed with InteliChart’s Patient Portal training. They offered live sessions, recorded sessions we could refer back to, as well as hands-on sessions,” said Owens.

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Meaningful Use

Tidewater was apprehensive about the impact converting to a new portal might have on their Meaningful Use metrics. “As someone in charge of Meaningful Use and PHI, transitioning to a new portal caused me serious concern,” said Owens.

“But with InteliChart’s migration process and their historical data management, all of our patients’ historical health data was brought forward on day one. I saw first-hand how quickly our MU numbers returned to pre-conversion levels, so I encourage other people in my position to set that fear aside.”

InteliChart was the first patient engagement platform to receive ONC Meaningful Use certification dating back to 2012 and has led the way with ongoing certifications ever since. With full ONC certification and automated workflows, InteliChart propels quality payment program requirements.

What’s Next for Tidewater?

“Our positive experience with InteliChart and their Patient Portal has us looking forward to adding more solutions from their comprehensive platform as we build our patient engagement initiatives,” stated Owens.

“We see real value in having one vendor with multiple solutions that efficiently manage our patients. The simplicity of not bouncing between applications, as well as the consistency of all our solutions being on one unified platform, drove our decision to choose InteliChart.”

The strong partnership Tidewater has with InteliChart is enabling them to continue their leadership in the community and effectively meet the needs of their patients in the current climate of healthcare consumerism and value-based care.

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About Us 

As one of the original pioneers of patient management solutions, InteliChart is committed to helping healthcare organizations engage consumers at every level of care.

The Healthy Outcomes platform is the most comprehensive patient engagement tool on the market. It was designed to empower consumers to take control of their healthcare while simplifying the patient management process for providers.

A single, easy-to-implement integration is all that’s needed to access a robust set of tools to engage patients at every level of their healthcare journey—from initial engagement to healthy outcome.

 

 

Discover why some of the industry's largest healthcare organizations and EHR vendors partner with InteliChart for their patient engagement needs. We promise you haven't seen another solution like Healthy Outcomes.

 

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