Patients, Portals, and Poetry

Electronic health record portals that provide easy access for patients not only to their health information but also to their physicians have been the subject of much soul-searching. One key concern is whether there should be limits to removing barriers between patients and knowledge of their own clinical care. "The Portal" explores this question from the patient's perspective, with poetry serving as an instrument more compelling even than MyChart in attempting to answer it. The repetition of "your hand" in the first stanza emphasizes human connection, that the poem sees as threatened by the impersonal "ding" of a notification and suspended "click/like a held breath" that the digital world imposes on users. So too, the speaker risks seeming a hacker, having logged in as the patient. Yet the poem revels in the joy of discovery the portal enables. Thus the poem itself becomes a portal too, one capable of joining patient and physician, and the human story of illness.