Patient Portal Empowers Families

One item that is a continuous source of frustration with our families is the inability to easily access their children’s medical information. From requesting reports or copies of their medical records to getting copies of test results, we know it is an area in which we can do better.

Our Strategic Improvement and IT Departments have been working tirelessly to provide a way for our parents to digitally access to their children’s information. And we’re excited to announce the launch of the My Children’s Specialized Patient & Family Portal. I’m happy to announce that the portal is live as of today!

This valuable tool was built in collaboration with our families and staff as a way to empower them to be able to continue to successfully manage their child's health care.

This patient portal tool is great. It will not only offer secure online access to the patient’s medical records, but it will also allow the families to review and pay their bills online.

Over time, we hope to introduce a feature to allow families to schedule appointments! This is a very exciting time to be able to meet the families’ demands in this way.

The team has worked diligently to ensure that this tool abides by current laws on what parents can and cannot see. Families will be able to:

• View their child’s physician and therapy reports, including discharge summaries and progress notes
• View information regarding their visits, including evaluations and discharge summaries
• View upcoming appointment dates and times as well as set appointment reminders and request cancellations of appointments
• View medications and allergy information
• View billing statements and pay bills online
• Share their health record with other healthcare providers or individuals in various formats, including e-mail and downloading capabilities

Although this solution will solve an issue for our families, it may cause unintended consequences that we will have to address.

For example, the notes that are put in the medical record –how we word things about their child's progress and whether or not we are putting things in the record that we haven't communicated to the family directly – will now be open for the family to view.

For some, this may cause concern. Perhaps you wrote something that was not communicated, or worded something in a way that could be misunderstood. We will work through these issues together. We need to ensure that we continually remind ourselves that we are responding to families’ needs and will ultimately improve the information flow and the patient experience.

This is a very exciting step in how we provide care and information to our families; it will help to minimize the amount of administrative tasks that employees are responsible for, allowing them to assist families in other ways. I wanted to make sure you knew both that this was coming to fruition and the “why” behind initiative and why it is so important or our families.