With a meaningful use requirement for healthcare organizations to drive at least 5 percent of their patients to an online portal, KLAS finds that three vendors have more than 20 percent of their customers' patients accessing the portal, a number that far surpasses the 5 percent meaningful use requisite.

The three vendors KLAS deemed most effective at helping their clients drive patient portal adoption are: athenahealth, Epic and Medfusion.

Many healthcare organizations have expressed anxiety concerning the patient portal mandate, saying they are concerned about being responsible for a mandate that relies on what other people (the patients) do.

[See also: Patient portal mandate triggers anxiety.]

As part of its research for the report "Patient Portals 2015: Adoption beyond Meaningful Use," KLAS interviewed 186 healthcare provider organizations to determine which vendors have proven to best meet current needs while also developing solutions for the future.

The report analyzes three types of portals: enterprise, ambulatory and EMR agnostic. The focus of the report is to examine product performance, vendor guidance and other factors that impact providers' ability to achieve success with patient portal adoption, according to KLAS.

"Value-based care is forcing patient portals to evolve from being merely tools for reactive regulatory compliance to becoming valuable instruments that allow patients to proactively engage in their own care," said report author Coray Tate, in a news release. "Providers report that vendor guidance and functionality that patients find useful, such as billing and self-scheduling, are the most effective ways to encourage portal adoption among patients."

[See also: MU Stage 2 sparks patient portal market.]