MyChart Patient Portal Support: Bon Secours Health System

By Lead IT

For over 180 years, Bon Secours has reached out to the community to find better ways of providing help to patients in a seven-state area primarily situated on the East Coast. MyChart is instrumental in their plan to engage the patient, and it is more involved in home health.

Early in 2010, Bon Secours sought the help of PDS to provide patient support for MyChart, and learned they could expect up to 25% of thier active MyChart patients to contact them for help.

It became apparent to Bon Secours that patient support wasn’t a good fit for their
existing IT support desk. 24×7 support by a team that is familiar with MyChart as
implemented by Bon Secours was essential to providing good help to patients.

PDS is the leader in MyChart patient support and came highly recommended by other organizations that avail themselves of the services of PDS.

Samantha Felt, MyChart Application Lead, said, “It made sense to us knowing that we needed 24×7 and we didnt have the infrastructure to do that.  Our key stateholders wanted a single provider to support our patients ina  centeralized manner, even though our facilities are decentralized. Deciding to outsource to a company with a track record of sucess that could do this job in a more efficient manner was a no-brainer.”

Easy Implementaion and Great Results

Working with PDS was “pretty stress free,” accordingto Ms.Felt. It was the first time that Bon Secours had worked with PDS, a Wisconsin-based company, and there was some initial, although short-lived apprehension about entrusting patient support to an outside organization.  Those fears were quickly dismissed once PDS bagan taking calls. “After a couple months it was a non-issue and it was very affirming that we made the right decision.”

PDS proved to be easy to work.  A specialist in MyChart implementation visited Bon Secours to lead in the development of workflows.  The experience brought by PDS was very helpful in getting through the set-up quickly and efficiently.  By suggesting workflows based on the best practices PDS used with other MyChart implementations, only adjustments in tweaking were required in many cases, rather than developing them from scratch. In less than four weeks, MyChart support was ready and calls and email started coming in. “She was fabulous,” said Ms. Felt of the PDS engagment specialist, “She responded to all of my questions in a timely manner, has a great attitude, is easily accessible, and willing to change on a dime. I really enjoy working with her.”

In the first six months of support, patient usage of MyChart has grown steadily, and with only a fraction of the entire Bon Secours Health System offering MyChart, over 10,000 patients are actively using it, and it’s expected that as many as 200,000 patients may someday use the good help of MyChart as a facet of their health care.

Bon Secours is very pleased with the high quality, professional support that PDS offers.  There has been no negative feedback from the facilities offering MyChart since the inception of the service, and very few issues that were out of scopre and needed to be escalated to Bon Secours.  In the rare situation where an issue requires escalation to Bon Secours, PDS always takes a appropriate action and dollows up with the patient, freeing Bon Secours from handling patient support. Ms.Felt explain, “When I have questions, I get very fast response that I really appreciate.”

Summary

“It’s very quiet and is something we don’t have to worry about.  The patients are getting the support they need and it’s been very successful at taking work off me so that I can focus on growth and other matters of our business,” affirmed Ms.Flet.  Great support via a cost-effective support model using PDS proved to be the best way for Bon Secours to deliver patient support for MyChart.  Ms. Falt sums it up by saying, “I have nothing but positive things to say about PDS!”