patient portals

Patient portals have tremendous potential — but that potential has not been realized and CAN NOT be realized as portals are currently configured. An understanding of platform business models and strategy explains why today’s patient portals are inherently suboptimal. This essay is the first in an occasional series that will look at patient portals through the lenses of platform business models and strategy. Today’s post will introduce and explain platform terminology of multihoming and single homing. Future posts will look more deeply into “why” current patient portals can’t work and will propose options for portals that could work for patients.

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At the company where I work, Achieve Internet, we view Drupal as more than just a CMS — we see it as a powerful web application platform with capabilities to integrate multiple sources of information. Sporting a far-reaching and flexible API, Drupal can link together other platforms that provide APIs, such as enterprise productivity systems or electronic health records (EHRs), and essentially provide Drupal’s web pages as an interface to these systems on both a read and write basis. The growth of the platform and the community has put Drupal in a position to revolutionize the concept of a traditional CMS in one market sector after another, from the media and entertainment industries to education, travel, and government.
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As described in the first three posts in this series, today’s patient portals are inherently flawed and doomed to mediocrity. The result is that today’s patient portals cannot achieve a critical mass of adoption and utilization, and therefore portals can’t achieve network effects. In this post, we will: Summarize key points from the first three posts in this series; Explain how today’s patient portals miss out on three types of network effects; Explain the implications: why tomorrow’s portals must be reconfigured to achieve network effects

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