Let’s stop calling them patient portals, for crying out loud.
It’s a relic of the early internet days; when you could go to this cool technology called the world wide web that let you peer into far away places which were new and candidly, otherworldly. Yahoo was a portal – waaaay back in the day. To me, it’s reminiscent of the old TV shows Land of the Lost dimensional portal and Star Trek machinations about the future. It conjures up quantum physics and a tear in the time-space continuum.
For some reason, the healthcare cognoscenti are as creative as a lizard when it comes to using language that is both welcoming and fresh.
Patient Portals sound sterile and distant. Furthermore, a portal is a gateway; both an entrance and an exit. Patients, or better, people want access. They want information like everyone else…and why are they called patients (separate post – coming soon).
We don’t log into an Apple Portal, a Facebook Portal or a Google Portal.Continue reading…
