Journal of medical Internet research
-
J. Med. Internet Res. · Nov 2014
Characteristics of patient portals developed in the context of health information exchanges: early policy effects of incentives in the meaningful use program in the United States.
In 2014, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in the United States launched the second stage of its Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Program, providing financial incentives to providers to meaningfully use their electronic health records to engage patients online. Patient portals are electronic means to engage patients by enabling secure access to personal medical records, communication with providers, various self-management tools, and administrative functionalities. Outcomes of patient portals have mainly been reported in large integrated health systems. This may now change as the EHR Incentive Program enables and supports the use of patient portals in other types of health systems. In this paper, we focus on Health Information Exchanges (HIE): entities that facilitate data exchange within networks of independent providers. ⋯ Optimizing patient value should be the main principle underlying policies intending to increase online patient engagement in the third stage of the EHR Incentive Program. We propose a number of features for the EHR Incentive Program that will enhance patient value and thereby support the growth and sustainability of patient portals provided by Health Information Exchanges.
-
J. Med. Internet Res. · Nov 2014
The reliability of tweets as a supplementary method of seasonal influenza surveillance.
Existing influenza surveillance in the United States is focused on the collection of data from sentinel physicians and hospitals; however, the compilation and distribution of reports are usually delayed by up to 2 weeks. With the popularity of social media growing, the Internet is a source for syndromic surveillance due to the availability of large amounts of data. In this study, tweets, or posts of 140 characters or less, from the website Twitter were collected and analyzed for their potential as surveillance for seasonal influenza. ⋯ Compared to tweet analyses in the previous influenza season, this study demonstrated increased accuracy in using Twitter as a supplementary surveillance tool for influenza as better filtering and classification methods yielded higher correlations for the 2013-2014 influenza season than those found for tweets in the previous influenza season, where emergency department ILI rates were better correlated to tweets than sentinel-provided ILI rates. Further investigations in the field would require expansion with regard to the location that the tweets are collected from, as well as the availability of more ILI data.