Funding outcome

Empowering parents in a pediatric asthma clinic: Implementation of electronic patient portals. Caring for a child with asthma or another long-term breathing problem can be stressful for families and caregivers. Recently, in Canada, information technology is being used to help patients and families manage these chronic diseases. One solution is providing parents with access to their child's health records through electronic patient portals. Families who use electronic portals to see results of their medical tests, book appointments online, or communicate with their doctors and nurses report better satisfaction with care, understanding of health information, proper use of medicines, enhanced relationships with doctors, better self-care, and a sense of empowerment. Also, we see less inpatient and emergency visits, more efficient medicine refills, and less no-show rates to clinic appointments. In Edmonton, patient portals have been used for adult patients since 2016. But patient-, provider- and system-related benefits of electronic patient portals have not been properly examined. We need to know this kind of information to make sure that we use patient portals in the best way possible, to support families at the Stollery. The Stollery Children's Hospital will be adding patient portal to its clinics, in the coming 2-3 years. Respirology Clinic will be the first pediatric clinic to use these patient portals. The patient portal MyChart will be offered to parents who bring their children to this clinic. We will talk to and survey parents, clinic staff, and health care providers to figure out if these portals are useful, and how best to use them. We think that helping family caregivers of sick children to self-schedule clinic visits, access their children's health information, and email their health care providers will improve overall satisfaction for the families, and take away some of the stress for them, as well as reduce the number of missed clinic appointments and emergency department visits by these children. We can then use this information to help optimize what is done in future Stollery clinics that will be using MyChart.