| Community Report |
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A
note from Jim Barnhart, CEO, PeaceHealth Siuslaw Region |
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Most of you may be aware that we launched an online service for patients of Health Associates. This service, called PatientConnection, is designed to allow greater access (24/7) to the physicians' front office.
PatientConnection, accessed through PeaceHealth's website, allows patients to handle routine tasks that normally require a phone call. Some examples of this would be: requesting a doctor's appointment or a physician referral, changing personal information, viewing the status of an account with Health Associates, paying any outstanding balance electronically and more.
This service is quite new within PeaceHealth Corporate (and frankly, throughout the country). One Clinic in Eugene has been piloting a slightly different version of PatientConnection for about a year and staff in the Web Services Department are continually working with the Developer, IDX, to refine and improve the functionality.
I want to applaud the staff at Health Associates for their willingness to learn a new way of interacting with patents. It's not easy in the day-to-day rush of the Clinic to introduce an alternative way of communicating, while at the same time it can be an exciting opportunity to be in on the 'ground floor' of a new way of providing service.
All patients of physicians at Health Associates (which likely means most of you!) should have received a letter from me in the mail with registration and other information about this new service. I encourage you go to: http://www.peacehealth.org, click on the PatientConnection icon to register or sign-in as a guest.
Thanks again to the staff at Health Associates. I look forward to monitoring the acceptance among our patients of this tool and I hope our learning experience in Florence will contribute to a broader implementation throughout PeaceHealth.