What happens when primary care practices don’t provide patients with the service they demand, including flexible hours? Someone else does.

An outsider might assume that New York City youth are universally savvy and self-reliant, capable of finding their way in what is, after all, one of the world’s largest and most diverse cities, a place that is brash, bold, and seemingly bursting with confidence.

But the reality is that youth everywhere face many of the same problems, have many of the same questions, and struggle with many of the same issues. Those issues range from dealing with the physical and emotional changes that come with puberty to questions of identity, self-confidence, and how to navigate the world.

Let’s Talk about Excellence!

At Prime Care Family Practice of Prince George, Virginia, things were going well. Having worked with eClinicalWorks since 2012, the practice had an excellent healthcare IT partner. Providers were seeing 600 patients each week. The phones were busy.

But early in 2016, Dr. Amar Shah recognized a serious deficiency in his Patient Engagement strategy: It was all about the telephone.

Telephones are great, but if they are the primary or sole method patients use to reach their providers, access to healthcare can suffer, along with patient satisfaction.

When it comes to making quality healthcare available to any community, what’s the first challenge? Access.

After all, the best medical services in the world are of no value unless patients can make use of them. And even when a doctor/patient relationship has been established, the doctors and patients sometimes need help staying in touch and making best use of available resources.

That’s where a tool such as Patient Portal can make a critical difference.

In October 2016, Frontiers in Psychiatry published an online review of studies regarding cellphone addiction, some of which suggest that many people today might be a bit over-attached to those gadgets that seem to take care of more and more of our daily tasks.