Case Study: Virginia Mason achieves 1M+ annual portal messages and major staff-time savings with Cerner's patient portal

Portal success leads to more than 20 million page views at Virginia Mason

Virginia Mason, a Seattle-based health system, worked with Cerner to address rising administrative burdens and improve patient‑provider communication. The organization needed a scalable way to handle growing volumes of appointment requests, test results and phone calls while making care more convenient and reducing staff workload.

They deployed Cerner’s patient portal with self‑scheduling, secure messaging, refill requests and electronic results reporting, plus standardized enrollment and workflows. Results include growth to 163,089 portal users by July 2017 (from ~100,000 in 2015), more than 20 million portal page views since 2014, 13,750 self‑scheduled appointments in Jan–Jul 2017 (about 450–500/week) saving an estimated 41,000 staff minutes, and 685,672 inbound/outbound messages in the first seven months of 2017 (on pace for >1 million messages/year).

Virginia Mason

A. James Bender

Medical Director of Clinical Informatics