How Bridge Improves Patient Engagement for Allscripts® Users

As a result of acquiring 3rd party software vendors, many of the today’s leading Electronic Health Records (EHR) organizations, such as Allscripts®, offer multiple software platforms, including EHR, patient portals and Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) solutions.  Their patient portals, often lack customizability and have trouble adapting the software to organizations’ unique workflows and preferences. Some of the other underlying issues we have discovered in organizations using EHR-bundled patient portals include:

EHR-Bundled Patient Portals	Bridge Patient Portal
Outdated technology used for Patient Portal such as Microsoft Silverlight, often as a result of outdated EHR/RCM software platforms.	Bridge employs the latest technologies for its patient portal and mobile app solutions. For example, Bridge is developed using HTML5, PHP and Javascript, and the mobile app is developed in React Native.
Struggle with managing multiple EHR/RCM products and delivering adequate support on these products.	Vendors such as Allscripts have accumulated multiple products over the years through acquisition of vendors, including Eclipsys and Misys. The FollowMyHealth® patient portal was one of these products, acquired from Jardogs. Bridge is solely focused on the patient engagement space, making it easier to provide high quality support and ongoing maintenance/enhancements.
Lack of control over the information sent to the patient portal, including sensitive lab results, incomplete progress notes, or age restricted information.	Bridge has a robust API and proprietary CCDA parser that allows providers to completely control the information that patients can see in the portal.
Allscripts is predominantly used in outpatient environments. When it is used in an integrated delivery network (IDN) environment with inpatient facilities, it’s typically not the only EHR and the health organization is challenged with providing a single patient portal solution for all of its customers.	In multi-health system environments, Allscripts is a system that is frequently used with other systems. Bridge offers an vendor neutral patient portal with the ability to serve data from multiple, disparate sources (including multiple EHR or RCM solutions).
No mobile app or app is branded to EHR company (ie. Epic MyChart® or FollowMyHealth®).	Bridge has developed a unparalleled mobile app that is branded to the client and made available in the Apple Store and Google Play store under the client’s name and brand at Universe.
Patient’s are unable to register for the patient portal without the assistance of office staff.	Bridge supports patient self-registration by requiring patients to answer challenge questions or using a PIN number provided to them by the practice.
Intake forms don’t populate in the EHR.	EHRs generally have a hard time receiving patient entered health history data. Bridge is able to deposit intake form information into discrete data fields in the EHR, so long as the EHR supports this functionality.

Interface Capabilities

In addition to providing a solution to the issues listed above, Bridge Patient Portal improves interoperability by enabling you to share data with disparate clinical and financial systems, providing interfaces when and where you need them. Below is a list of our interface capabilities with Allscripts® via their API:

• Unidirectional C-CDAs
• Unidirectional Demographics

Bridge is actively improving the interface it has with Allscripts, so check with a Bridge representative for more information.

DISCLAIMER: All product and company names are trademarks™ or registered® trademarks of their respective holders. Bridge Patient Portal is not affiliated, endorsed or sponsored in any way to the service providers mentioned in this article.