BOSTON – The patient portal launched in July 2007 at the Mayo Clinic was running smoothly – until edlam roke out ast December.

The ary, .C.-based  Medfusion system was on overload due to the software company’s rapid growth, and or  month or so, online access was sporadic.        

Such are the growing pains as doctors embrace the technological revolution.

Mayo’s experience with its first ePatients was the topic of a presentation at the annual scientific assembly of the American Academy of Family Physicians in Boston.

John Bachman, MD, a consultant in family medicine at the Rochester, Minn., group practice, detailed Mayo’s switch from on-site appointments to online visits,  highlighting his experience as lead coordinator.

“Traditional family medicine is merging with the technologies and processes of the 21st Century,” he noted. More than 2,200 Mayo patients have used the pilot program so far, he said.

Training staff to use the online system was a cultural shift and counter-intuitive process, said Bachman. Classroom lectures flopped, he said, but when staff dove in, they mastered the learning curve.

“It was sink or swim,” said Bachman. “They all swam."

Through a secure portal, patients can request prescription refills and communicate with practice staff, which legally protects doctors from the vagaries of a phone call, he said.

“If it’s online, you’ve got proof of what you did and didn’t do,” said Gordon E. Riddle, MD, a family physician from Bracebridge, Ontario, Canada.

To resolve the overload crisis last winter, Medfusion “deployed new critical infrastructure while redeploying and distributing applications in its production datacenter,” said Yvette M. Cole, the company’s marketing manager.
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