MHS GENESIS' patient portal is rapidly increasing in size, capability, and usability.

Features gaining in popularity include a health library, provided by corporate partner Healthwise, said Air Force Lt. Col. John DaLomba, solution owner for the MHS GENESIS patient portal, at the Defense Health Agency (DHA) in Falls Church, Virginia.

"People can look up pretty much anything that they want" such as knee pain or diabetes, he said. "It's really quite good, and quite extensive."

But the portal's "best feature, in my opinion, is the secure messaging," said DaLomba, who is also an occupational therapist. "You can exchange secure information with your provider or provider's team, and all the communication takes place within the electronic health record program. You have exactly what was conveyed - there's no opportunity to misconstrue what was typed in."

Older MHS GENESIS communication systems were limited to a member's primary care physician. The new portal system allows communication with an empaneled provider or specialty clinic and their teams of professionals with authorized access. That last part is important so that communications go to a "message pool," and don't just sit unopened in an inbox if a provider is unavailable.

The tool allows communication with certain civilian health care professionals, too, and decreases the need to use a fax machine, DaLomba said. He added that there are more new features coming for the patient portal but couldn't give an exact timeline because of the need to work out licensing and acquisition periods.

Meanwhile there is an online scheduling capability for primary care physicians, and patients have the opportunity to view (and print) a lot of information from visit summaries and clinical notes, DaLomba said. Tests and measurements can also be viewed, though there is a built-in 36-hour delay for radiology and lab results, enabling doctors to view the results and prepare to communicate what they mean to the patient, particularly if there is an issue to discuss. For COVID-19 testing results, however, this delay has been removed.

DaLomba has used the MHS patient portal as a provider as recently as last year when he came to the DHA. And he had plenty of experience with the Military Heath System's legacy documentation efforts - two separate systems for inpatient and outpatient records. MHS GENESIS, which he started using at Travis Air Force Base in California in September 2019, incorporates both.

"It was a big change for everybody to get used to," he said. "Were there challenges? Of course there were. We were trained and there was plenty of support available. But it went well."

MHS GENESIS has been rolling out in waves around the military; eventually the entire MHS will transition from the legacy platforms. "It's a very complex deployment schedule, and it's mapped out through the next several years," DaLomba said. The first wave came in 2017, at sites in the Pacific Northwest.