Providence Tutorial Aims to Increase Shared Access for Care Partners
In recognition of National Caregivers Month, Providence has launched a new video designed to increase shared access to the patient portal. Through this video, patients and care partners gain a clear understanding of the benefits of shared access as well as step-by-step instructions for granting shared access through Providence’s instance of MyChart. Dr. Marianne Parshley, the video’s narrator, is a clinician at Providence who is also a care partner for her aging parents.
The video is a product of the Engaging Family Care Partners through Shared Access to the Electronic Health Record project funded by the John A. Hartford Foundation.
As a part of this project, a human-centered design (HCD) team from Johns Hopkins and OpenNotes met with key health care stakeholders—including patients, care partners, and health professionals—to evaluate existing communications materials about shared access and identify ways to increase understanding of the topic. A leading prototype emerged from this process—to adapt a generic shared access instruction video by Epic into to a more customized video with live navigation, mirroring exactly what patients would be seeing in their own MyChart accounts.
Even though the video is specific to Providence, the basic concepts can be applied to any organization using an Epic electronic health record (EHR) platform. A future step is to document the process for making the video available online so other health systems can replicate the process.
The Engaging Family Care Partners through Shared Access to the Electronic Health Record project is led by OpenNotes at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Roger C. Lipitz Center for Integrated Health Care at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
