Mercy Radiology empowers patients with new portal

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Mercy Radiology has gone live with a patient portal allowing patients to book and change appointments, as well as view their radiology results.

The organisation has also implemented a referrer portal to allow referring clinicians to book appointments and view results. 

Both went live in October last year and are being refined and enhanced as part of an ongoing iterative development process.

Mercy Radiology is getting 350 online bookings and around 250 views of images and reports through the patient portal every week. 

Alexis Stewart, director of strategic progammes at Mercy Radiology, says the portal has sped up a patient’s time to diagnosis by reducing a process that previously took around 20 working days, down to three days on average.

The online bookings component of the system uses Aceso’s cloud-based Snapscan platform and the portal component has been developed inhouse. 

When a person is referred for an appointment at Mercy Radiology, an email is sent with a link to book and/or change the appointment. The system verifies the patient by asking identity and security questions and the link expires after seven days.

Once verified, the patient chooses what service they require and can see options of locations and times to attend. When their scans and/or reports are ready to view, they are sent another link to access them.

The referrer portal allows clinicians to log in and create an electronic referral, then book it while they have the patient in front of them or get a booking link sent to the patient. The referrer can then see if the patient has made the booking and attended the appointment and see the scans and/or reports when they are available.

Lloyd McCann, chief executive of Mercy Radiology & Clinics and head of digital health, Healthcare Holdings Ltd, says the portal is about empowering patients by giving them access to information when it is convenient for them to access or use it.

He describes the design, development and deployment process as iterative, with users feeding back on the system and changes made before updates are released.

The booking system involved building an API with the organisation’s rostering system in order to determine which radiologists are available on which days and at which locations. Also, the creation of online forms so if someone requires a blood test before a certain type of scan, they can leave time for that to happen. 

The next step will be to automate the request for the blood test, says McCann.

He says the arrival of Covid-19 accelerated work on the patient and referrer portals as a way to reduce the reliance on paper in the system and digitally enhance the process and users’ experience.

The response from patients has been “overwhelmingly positive” and questions have led to the creation of a glossary of commonly used radiology terms for patients to refer to. 

“Ultimately this is a health system shift we need to make, towards being comfortable with patients being the custodians of their own data and information,” says McCann.