In January 2016, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt announced that CMS would update Meaningful Use to focus more on patient care and outcomes.

At the same time, Slavitt brought renewed attention to the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015—MACRA—triggering confusion among hospitals and health systems already scrambling to attest to Meaningful Use. 

Many questions arose. What is MACRA? What is the relationship between MACRA and Meaningful Use? Is Meaningful Use over?

By now it seems that every hospital has a patient portal. But is everyone—hospitals and patients alike—using them to their full potential? According to one survey, many patients still don’t know their providers offer portals. As providers, we also depend on getting patients to visit their portals to initiate patient-provider communication. When used well, portals help hospitals engage patients and meet Meaningful Use requirements. The challenge is in how to make good use of your patient portal.

HealthEast Care System was determined to use our portal to improve health outcomes through proactive, consistent health information that patients could access anywhere. Here’s how we did it.

In 2011, the BirthPlace at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital–Plymouth (BID-Plymouth), in Massachusetts, was losing patients to other maternity units, and the hospital considered closing it. Instead, we decided to rebrand the BirthPlace and our outpatient OB/GYN and Midwifery practices with a focus on improving the patient experience.

We determined that we could impact patient experience best by working cross-functionally—aligning the marketing, clinical and IT teams—and implementing digital health tools that supported the new brand by improving patient-provider communication and increasing patient satisfaction.

We were right! Here’s how our hospital did it and what we learned.

This week, CMS released its final rule for Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement (CJR), putting 790 hospitals on notice that hip and knee replacement reimbursements from the nation’s largest insurer will be tied to cost containment and high standards for patient care.