Professional Development Award 121 Shepherd Center

I will present at the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine on a project I have been participating in for the past year about electronic portals. Electronic portals enable people to engage in personal healthcare choices and manage on-going care. The Patient Engagement Portal PEP, developed by two large rehabilitation hospitals that could not find an off-the-shelf solution to meet their population needs, is an easy to use tool for patients with physical and/or cognitive disabilities. PEP contains six sections - User Profile, Allergies/Medications, Equipment/Supplies, Resources, Documents, and Caregivers - that are easily identified and accessible on the home page. PEP is tethered to the hospital EMR for initial activation of records and populating of select demographic/injury information as well as upload of admission and discharge documents. Once a patient activates an account, the patient becomes responsible for updating information and fields are no longer populated from the EMR. The goal of this dual design is to promote initial use by populating the portal with information deemed important by patients and clinical staff and then to facilitate self-reliance in portal use for managing injury conditions and coordinating with local care teams after returning to home environments. 45% of eligible patients have activated accounts and logged into the portal at least once. The average number of logins per patient is 2.4. The section of the portal that patients report is most helpful and accessed most frequently 33% is Resources a hospital provided list of on-line and community resources. The Documents section is the next most frequently accessed 19%. Clinicians can download patient-specific information documents, videos, URLs into this section to encourage portal use.