The Missing Ingredient in Today’s Patient Portals: Network Effects

Healthcare Platform Blog October 23, 2022
Vince Kuraitis and Jody Ranck

As described in the first three posts in this series, today’s patient portals are inherently flawed and doomed to mediocrity. The result is that today’s patient portals cannot achieve a critical mass of adoption and utilization, and therefore portals can’t achieve network effects.

In this post, we will:

Summarize key points from the first three posts in this series
Explain how today’s patient portals miss out on three types of network effects
Explain the implications: why tomorrow’s portals must be reconfigured to achieve network effects

Summarizing

Let’s review some of the key points from the first three posts in this series.

Patients would prefer one portal “home” (from the 1st post in this series):

By definition, today’s portals...