The Bridge Patient Portal has been designed to make life easier for all parties and also consolidate numerous systems to drastically reduce costs, and improve patient and physician relationships, making it an all-in-one mobile-friendly solution that improves patient outcomes. To learn more about the portal, we conducted an interview with John Deutsch, CEO Bridge Patient Portal.
1. Can you tell us more about Bridge Patient Portal?
Bridge Patient Portal is an enterprise patient portal and patient engagement solution that provides a superior user experience for healthcare organizations and their patients. The portal can connect to one or more EMR, PM & RCM systems, simultaneously, thus providing a single patient portal to the patient. Bridge Patient Portal is also available as an iOS or Android app.
2. How can Bridge Patient Portal reduce costs?
The greatest cost savings can be seen by improving front-office efficiency through the self-scheduling, bill pay and patient check-in features.
3. How can Bridge Patient portal improve patient and physician relationships?
Patient/provider secure messaging is by far the most popular feature of Bridge Patient Portal. This feature greatly improves patient and provider relationships, as well as producing increased brand loyalty to the health organization.
4. What kind of information would patients normally receive through your portal? In what forms would the patient receive such information?
The portal is most commonly used for retrieving messages from providers, lab results, invoices and appointment information. Bridge Patient Portal features many other functions, including Rx refills, medical records, forms and radiology reports, to name a few.
The portal synchronizes the patient’s current medication(s) list. From this current medications list, the patient can request an Rx refill. The Rx refill requests are instantly sent to the provider’s team for review and approval. Patients can also select the pharmacy of their choosing, including mail-order options.
6. How can the platform improve how patients set their appointments and improve the pace of their checkins?
The portal allows patients to schedule their own appointments online, without the assistance of front-office staff. Once scheduled, the patient will receive SMS, email and/or IVR-based appointment reminders. These reminders can include instructions for the patient to complete certain tasks before their appointment, reducing time spent during check-in. Bridge also offers a new patient check-in solution which allows patients to complete the entire in-office check-in process from their own phone or from a device provided by the office.
7. Can you tell us more about the “patient bill pay” option the platform provides?
The portal supports bi-directional interfaces into Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) systems, enabling patients to view their current invoices and statements, then pay any amount owing. The payment is then automatically posted back to the RCM by the portal, greatly reducing the time spent by staff to reconcile patient payments.
8. Can you elaborate a bit on the Bridge Patient Portal mobile interface?
The portal is developed using the latest coding libraries, which offer full support for mobile devices. The standard Bridge Patient Portal web application can be opened on a mobile device, and used just like it was an app. Furthermore, the portal can be published to the Apple App and Google Play stores for a further enhanced user experience.
9. Where do you see the patient experience industry after 5-years?
I believe the patient experience and patient engagement markets will continue to grow and outpace other sectors of healthcare IT, with the possible exception of cybersecurity and AI. I think the sector for mobile apps will continue to grow, especially with richer mobile apps that offer an entire suite of self-service tools for the patient all in one app. In 5 years, I don’t think we will be close to seeing this sector slow down, in fact, I think it will be in its prime.
10. What recommendations would you like to give to those willing to enter this industry?
Like anything in healthcare IT, it requires a long-term focus and staying power. Everything in healthcare IT moves slow, so it’s important to identify problems that aren’t going anywhere, anytime soon, but that also can be reasonably solved.
This interview has been sponsored by Bridge Patient Portal
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