Wayne,
Are you sending a practice-wide message by RelayHealth? I am not familiar with that.
What we do is create new portals at the patient encounter, and my nurse prints up the password information and educates on how to get started in person. There is some intial upfront teaching but over time the portal messaging back and forth has been a huge time saver, and has cut back on a lot of the phone tag.
As I understand Updox will not allow to send out practice wide messaging. However, one can create/design to a degree your own portal access information page, which I have done and have available 4 forms that patients can fill on their own computer at their own leisure. Demographic, appt request, medication request, medicare annual wellness visit forms that my wife created, and patients send thru portal and my nurse will copy and paste into the AC chart once received in the Updox work window. Also, I can let patients know when I go on vacation, and when I will be out of office by adding that to the portal site information.
On the other end making templates to attach to patients summaries have been helpful, such as handouts for the health maintnenace items such as advanced directives, exercise, alcohol usage, diabetic diets, low chol diets etc. My nurse reads in the summary (which I dictate at the visit) and attach with the summary the appropriate handout that I recommend under each health maintenance item and shoots it to the patient's portal who can then read on his smart phone before he gets home--quite efficient.
The ability to efax right from the exam room (currently using logmein on laptop remoted to main computer) so I can send my robitussin ac with my escript of amox has been a huge time saver, as well.
If you decide to create any handouts or templates, I can get my wife to help out, because she knows how to do that.
But if you are able to send out a practice wide message about educating/activating individual portals at time of contact during visit, might be helpful--it will be painful up front but in long run I suspect you will see the efficiencies pay off. I realize you did not ask for all of this, but as you can see, I am a bit exuberant about the interaction of AC and Updox, and in 18, almost 19 years of practice have not seen anything comparable in improving one's efficiency in the office.
