Patient portals — a key part of the Southern District Health Board’s primary and community care draft plan — need to be assessed to see if they are delivering as promised, the Auditor-general says.
Patient portals — secure websites which store a person’s health information and through which they can communicate with doctors and other professionals — are widely used in New Zealand and about 50% of GPs offer them.
Portals can be used for such tasks as booking appointments, viewing lab results and checking doctor’s notes.
The SDHB draft plan calls portals a ‘‘key development’’ which will ensure people get the right care at the right time.
An Auditor-general’s report on patient portals said there were signs portals were having a positive effect improving efficiency and access to health services.
However, the report said the Ministry of Health needed to monitor the effect of portals to obtain clear evidence of their impact.
‘‘The ministry monitored the uptake of patient portals but did not monitor whether the expected benefits were achieved.’’
That said, the Auditor-general did not see signs of negative effects and believed signs were promising,
Anecdotal evidence was positive, but that was based on 45 case studies rather than any specifically collated statistics.
Portal services had allowed GPs to better manage some high-use patients, and concerns people would misunderstand or misinterpret the information on the portal had generally been ill-founded, the report said.
The portal also freed up administration staff for other tasks, and made services such as repeat prescriptions easier.
When introduced, concerns had been raised about privacy and security of information, but no issues had been found, the report said.
The SDHB hopes that, if the plan is adopted, at least one-third of southerners will be ‘‘early adopters’’ of the portal system.
●The SDHB has rescheduled the Dunedin public meeting to discuss its draft primary and community care plan, which was postponed because of the flooding which affected Dunedin last week.
The meeting is scheduled for Friday, February 16, at 3.30pm, in the Hutton Theatre at Otago Museum.
