Three Million Patients Now Using Intuit Health’s Patient Portal to Communicate Online with Their Doctors

Government financial incentives, provider desire to offer better patient-physician communications and increasing patient demand are driving a renewed interest in patient portals.

Intuit Health, a unit of Intuit Inc. (Nasdaq:INTU), is responding by adding new features to help providers quickly share health information with their patients and by offering usage and financial incentives for its market-leading patient portal solution.

The Intuit Health portal, available to patients through more than 33,000 providers, recently surpassed 3 million registered users, including 1 million new patients who started using the solution since January.

"We’re changing the way patients and doctors communicate by uniquely solving the most pressing needs of both,” said Steve Malik, president and general manager of Intuit Health. "Patients love getting reminders and viewing their health information online and securely exchanging information with their doctor at their convenience. Providers are focused on Meaningful Use, but also appreciate how automating their communications is helping them save significant amounts of time and money.”

A Meaningful Use Solution

The Intuit Health patient portal enables providers to meet the federal government’s Meaningful Use requirement that calls for physicians to provide more than 10 percent of their patients with timely access to their health information. The new Secure Patient Data Export feature makes it easy for providers, especially the 75,000 medical practices currently using Intuit’s QuickBooks, to send relevant patient health information from their Electronic Health Record, or EHR, system directly to the patient’s personal health record via integrated or non-integrated methods. Once posted, patients can access their health records anytime, either from the provider’s website or directly at Intuit’s personal health record website.

"Meaningful Use is important because it’s the right thing to do for our patients,” said Shilpa Kothari, practice manager at Carolina Family Practice and Sports Medicine. "It would be very difficult to meet these requirements without Intuit Health’s solution.”

The patient portal also works with EHR products to help providers meet the following core and menu requirements listed in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, including:

• Providing patients with clinical summaries for each office visit for 50 percent of patients within three days.
• Providing more than 50 percent of patients who request it with an electronic copy of their health information.
• Sending more than 20 percent of patients’ reminders for preventive and follow-up care.

Intuit Health’s automated registration tools and marketing materials are already helping many providers meet the 10 percent utilization requirement. To further encourage and assist providers to meet federal benchmarks, the first 100 new clients to adopt Intuit Health’s patient portal before Dec. 31, and have 10 percent of their patients registered on the portal by June 20, 2011 will pay no monthly fees for six months.

Portal Demand and Usage is Growing Fast

Patients currently use the secure, practice-branded portal 100,000 times every day to request appointments, pay bills, refill prescriptions, complete medical forms, receive lab results and clinical summaries, conduct virtual office visits, ask questions, and exchange messages for related care and administrative issues.

"Our providers use the Intuit Health Patient Portal to communicate with 6,800 registered patients. We collect more than $4,000 a month through the portal, we’ve reduced monthly phone calls by more than 2000 and have fewer patient no shows,” said Nancy Babbitt, administrator at Roswell Pediatric Center in North Atlanta and incoming vice chair of the Medical Group Management Association National Board of Directors. "We’re delighting patients while making our practices more efficient.”

A 2010 Intuit Health survey found that 72 percent of respondents would use an online tool to help them pay their medical bills, communicate with their doctor more easily, make appointments, and get lab results. Eighty-four percent said they would complete their medical forms online before their appointment if they had that option.

Intuit Health is part of the MGMA AdminiServe® Partner Network and a Member Advantage partner for the American Academy of Family Physicians. More information about Intuit Health solutions is available on the company’s website.

Multimedia: Patient Portal demo video

Related Pages:

• "How Patient Portals Create Value for Patients -- and Fulfill Meaningful Use” Requirements” – A White Paper By Elizabeth W. Woodcock, MBA, FACMPE, CPC
• Intuit Health website
• Follow Intuit Health on Twitter

About Intuit Inc.

Intuit Inc. is a leading provider of business and financial management solutions for small and mid-sized businesses; financial institutions, including banks and credit unions; consumers and accounting professionals. Its flagship products and services, including QuickBooks®, Quicken® and TurboTax®, simplify small business management and payroll processing, personal finance, and tax preparation and filing. ProSeries® and Lacerte® are Intuit's leading tax preparation offerings for professional accountants. Intuit Financial Services helps banks and credit unions grow by providing on-demand solutions and services that make it easier for consumers and businesses to manage their money.

Founded in 1983, Intuit had annual revenue of $3.5 billion in its fiscal year 2010. The company has approximately 7,700 employees with major offices in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, India and other locations. More information can be found at www.intuit.com.

About Intuit Health

Intuit Health improves healthcare by developing groundbreaking clinical, administrative and financial services that connect providers and patients. We’ve combined Intuit’s legendary approach to simplifying complex tasks with Medfusion’s expertise in provider-patient communications. The result: It’s easier than ever to understand and pay medical bills, get lab results, schedule appointments, and give patients timely electronic access to their health information. Learn more at www.intuithealth.com

Intuit and the Intuit logo, Intuit Health, among others, are registered trademarks and/or registered service marks of Intuit Inc. in the United States and other countries. Other parties' trademarks or service marks are the property of their respective owners and should be treated as such.