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J Am Med Inform Assoc doi:10.1136/amiajnl-2011-000382
  • Brief communication

Triaging patients at risk of influenza using a patient portal

  1. Gretchen Purcell Jackson1,3,6
  1. 1Department of Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, USA
  2. 2Department of Internal Medicine, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, USA
  3. 3Department of Pediatrics, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, USA
  4. 4Vanderbilt University Hospital Administration, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, USA
  5. 5Tennessee Hospital Administration, Nashville, Tennessee, USA
  6. 6Department of Pediatric Surgery, Monroe Carell Jr Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt, Nashville, Tennessee, USA
  1. Correspondence to Dr S Trent Rosenbloom, Eskind Biomedical Library, Room 440, 2209 Garland Avenue, Nashville, TN 37232-8340, USA; trent.rosenbloom{at}vanderbilt.edu

  1. Contributors All authors have contributed substantively to this work.

  • Received 4 November 2010
  • Accepted 12 November 2011
  • Published Online First 1 December 2011

Abstract

Vanderbilt University has a widely adopted patient portal, MyHealthAtVanderbilt, which provides an infrastructure to deliver information that can empower patient decision making and enhance personalized healthcare. An interdisciplinary team has developed Flu Tool, a decision-support application targeted to patients with influenza-like illness and designed to be integrated into a patient portal. Flu Tool enables patients to make informed decisions about the level of care they require and guides them to seek timely treatment as appropriate. A pilot version of Flu Tool was deployed for a 9-week period during the 2010–2011 influenza season. During this time, Flu Tool was accessed 4040 times, and 1017 individual patients seen in the institution were diagnosed as having influenza. This early experience with Flu Tool suggests that healthcare consumers are willing to use patient-targeted decision support. The design, implementation, and lessons learned from the pilot release of Flu Tool are described as guidance for institutions implementing decision support through a patient portal infrastructure.

Footnotes

  • Funding This project was supported by a grant (to STR, number R18HS019276) from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

  • Competing interests None.

  • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

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