Aurora Health Care Creates a Best-of-Class Patient Portal

by Mark S. Gothberg

“This is the story of taking an off-the-shelf, out-of-the-box tool – the Epic pa­tient portal – and making it a branded, differentiated, and best-of-class portal experience,” says Cindy Moon-Mogush, senior vice president of communications at Aurora Health Care, an integrated system that serves eastern Wisconsin and northern Illinois.

Although the organization has long had a patient portal called MyAurora, it was cumbersome to use and had limited capabilities. Furthermore, the portal did not fully embrace the more than 180 applica­tions residing on different platforms and technologies in the organization. In fact, Aurora Health Care actually had two patient portals – one from Cerner and one from Epic – and faced the challenge of phasing out the Cerner system and transitioning patients to Epic.

“We were missing revenue and strong patient experience opportu­nities,” stresses Moon-Mogush. “Our goal was to simplify, to mask the complexity of multiple systems to make it easy to do business with us.”

More than 600 people gave their input to help design the new My­Aurora. From online surveys and videotaped sessions, where partici­pants were asked to find information of interest on the legacy portal, the design team gathered important in­formation on the functions that patients value most. Online ap­pointment scheduling and online consultations held the highest value. The two features are also the most disruptive to clinicians. These find­ings mirror research conducted by Gartner, says Jamey Shiels, vice president of e-business at Aurora. In addition, patients highly valued access to test results.

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