You’re collecting information about your patient’s health, but what are you doing with it? Does it sit—disconnected—in your digital systems? Or does it travel seamlessly between them?

The infographic below shows how hospitals and patients efficiently form a meaningful relationship and why digital connections and education are essential to value-based care.

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.

A recent study in Pediatrics suggests that patients (in this case, mothers) are not receiving consistent information and advice from their providers—Maternal Report of Advice Received for Infant Care (Eisenberg et al, August 2015)

“Mothers commonly report receiving either no advice or recommendation inconsistent advice from each of the four sources we studied [doctors, birth hospital nurses, family, and media] regarding immunization, breastfeeding, sleep position, sleep location and pacifier use.”

Before you brush off this data as just an attack on overworked nurses and doctors who are drowning in paperwork and EHR integration, I’d like to offer a different perspective.