Patient portals, once heralded as the pathway to empowered connection, have instead become transactional cul-de-sacs. They offer the illusion of convenience for tasks like booking appointments or viewing results, yet they critically fail to enable real communication and genuine listening between patients and providers.
Worse still, they force raw, decontextualized clinical data on already vulnerable patients, leaving them lost in confusion, anxiety, and profound disengagement.
How often have we been left staring at an incomprehensible lab result, desperately asking ourselves if it signals a crisis or a simple blip, because the essential context and human explanation are absent?
This isn’t just a design flaw; it’s a fundamental breakdown that reduces patients to passive “cogs in a workflow”. It erodes trust and deepens the chasm between care promised and care delivered.
The fix isn’t more features. It’s empathy.
Clinical and digital empathy together transform portals from one-directional message boards into tools that build respect, clarity, and partnership in care.
When executed well, patient engagement portals impact satisfaction and clinical outcomes. In one study, patients with an activated outpatient portal account reported higher Clinician and Group Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) satisfaction scores across a subset of dimensions.
However, they are typically function-focused and lack clinical, human-centered empathy, creating frustration instead of meaningful, useful connections. Many patients are dissatisfied with their portals or ignore them outright. In a study of the launch of MyChart, for example, users were dissatisfied ”with limited features and access to medical history and test results.”
Physician-Centered Technology
We have the opportunity to fundamentally redefine our approach, moving beyond systems that treat patients as datapoints and passive recipients of appointments, lab results, and messages. These have led to a widening disconnect between the promise of digital health and the lived experience of those it’s meant to serve.
Empathy is not a “soft skill”, but rather the undeniable basis for effective care. When digital tools convey clinical empathy, providers see healthcare through the patient’s eyes. Clinicians understand patients’ symptoms, fears, frustrations, and hopes as they’re transformed from bystanders into activated co-authors of their health journeys.
It encompasses:
- Listening – hearing the patient’s words, and the silences in between
- Empathizing – reflecting understanding in ways that resonate deeply
- Explaining – making the complex clear, relevant, and actionable
- Helping – delivering targeted support and resources shaped by those insights in a format that is useful to the patients, their caregivers, and their families
By truly listening and acknowledging patient and caregiver experiences, and then explaining and guiding with precision, clinicians turn clinical empathy into a tangible therapeutic intervention.
A Digital Portrait
Embedding clinical empathy into digital tools requires a shared ongoing understanding between physician and patient.
Too often, important context such as life events, stressors, social factors, and trends in health data remain scattered or unseen during an appointment.
A digital “snapshot,” powered by AI, can bring this together into one clear, accessible view. It combines clinical records, self-reported information, and life context to highlight what’s most relevant, what’s changed, and what needs discussion. Patients can tell their story without wading through complex charts, and clinicians get a concise, meaningful summary that surfaces priorities at a glance.
For patients, it turns raw medical data into something digestible and connected to real life. For clinicians, it shifts face-to-face time from searching for information to making decisions. By offering clarity, context, and portability, a shared patient snapshot can strengthen communication, improve care, and lighten administrative burdens, turning digital empathy from an idea into a daily reality.
Empathy is a strategic imperative. It strengthens trust, accelerates engagement, and fuels better outcomes. In every patient interaction, every workflow, and every portal login, do we simply transmit information and facilitate transactions, or do we create connections?
In a world where 27% of patients do not remember being verbally told their diagnosis, we are being called to optimize digital technology with empathy.
How we respond now will define the future of care.
About Jared Mauskopf
Jared Mauskopf is the CEO of Medical Web Experts, a company specializing in developing digital healthcare apps and
About John Deutsch
John Deutsch is the CEO of Bridge, a configurable, tailored patient engagement platform drawn on decades of both their personal experiences and skills designing and implementing digital health platforms to share what makes patient engagement tools effective in the age of digital health and value-based care.
