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Friction across multiple patient portals dramatically limits their usefulness—there’s no practical way for patients OR providers to reconcile and integrate information and workflow. This is the third post in our series on patient portals. We’ve used platform terminology and concepts to explain why today’s patient portals are doomed to mediocrity. Let’s recap: The first post in this series introduced the platform terminology of single-homing vs.multihoming. Patients strongly would prefer to have as few portals as possible — ideally one, i.e., a single “home”. The second post described the difference between stand-alone value and network value. Today’s patient portals can provide some stand-alone value, but they provide minimal network value. In this post we’ll discuss the pitfalls of friction across multiple portals. Your mom having seven portals is more than just inconvenient—it’s dangerous.

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Amazing though it may seem, we each experience the world differently. That's one reality with over 6 billion interpretations. Many of us use computers to broaden our experience of the world, but a computer is part of reality and so if you experience reality without, for instance, vision or sound, then you also experience a computer without vision or sound (or whatever your unique experience might be). As humans, we don't quite have the power to experience the world the way somebody does. We can mimic some of the surface-level things (I can close my eyes to mimic blindness, for example) but it's only an imitation, without history, context, or urgency. As a result of this complexity, we humans design things primarily for ourselves, based on the way we experience the world. That can be frustrating, from an engineering and design viewpoint, because even when you intend to be inclusive, you end up forgetting something "obvious" and essential, or the solution to one problem introduces a problem for someone else, and so on. What's an open source enthusiast, or programmer, or architect, or teacher, or just everyday hacker, supposed to do to make software, communities, and processes accessible?

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To be an effective leader in an open source community, you need a lot of information. How do I know who the most active members in my community are? Which companies are making the most contributions? Which contributors are drifting away and becoming inactive? Who in the community is knowledgeable about a specific topic? These were just a few of the questions I had when I started leading the Mautic community at Acquia. But the problem was not a shortage of information. On the contrary, there were so many places our community interacted and so many things to track that I was drowning in data. I could access plenty of data sources, but they were not helping me manage the community effectively or answering my questions.

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Public health information systems have always been a key component of the healthcare ecosystem. Links between clinical care and public health have only been increasing, propelled by the pandemic. As defined by the Public Health Informatics Institute (PHII) in its 2021 Immunization Information System (IIS) Core Competency Model, information systems management is the “application and administration of technologies to securely and effectively meet IIS program and user needs”. The pandemic highlighted the need for public health information systems to collect, track, and monitor vaccine administration for ages newborn through adulthood, and mandated data to be reported or accessible to a broad range of recipients at the local, state and federal level.

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