Contact email

kschnock@bwh.harvard.edu

Overview

• This study describes the use of an acute care patient portal to investigate its association with patient and care partner activation in the hospital setting.
• They group implemented an acute care patient portal on 6 acute care units over an 18 month period.
• They conclude that portal users most often accessed the portal to view clinical information and that tools may help facilitate patient engagement and improve outcomes when fully utilized by patients and care partners.

Department

Medicine

Collaborators

Kumiko O Schnock, RN, PhD

Julia E Snyder, BSc

Theresa E Fuller, BSc

Megan Duckworth, BA

Maxwell Grant, BA

Catherine Yoon, MS 1

Stuart Lipsitz, ScD

Anuj K Dalal, MD

David W Bates, MD, MSc

Patricia C Dykes, RN, PhD

Status/Stage of Development

Completed

Measurement

Characteristics of users or the portal, characterization of their use of the portal including number of visits to each page, number of days used, length of the user's access period, and the average percent of days used during the same access period. Patient and care partner activation was measured using the short form of the patient activation measure (PAM-13) and the caregiver patient activation measure (CG-PAM)

Results

59.01% of 2974 randomly sampled patients agreed to use the portal.
Compared to non-enrollees, acute care patient portal enrollees were:
-younger
-less sick
-less likely to have Medicare insurance
-and more likely to use the Partners Healthcare enterprise (Patient Gateway)
The most used features of the portal were:
-laboratory test results
-care team information
-medication list
Most users accessed the portal between 1-4 days during their hospitalization with an average number of days logged in at least once was 1.8.
On average, users accessed the portal 42.69% of the hospital days during which it was available.
Association with patient activation was significant on neurology and medicine services but not on the oncology service.

Additional details

Future studies should leverage usage metrics to describe portal use and assess the impact of health IT tools on specific outcome measures in the hospital setting.

Practice Setting

Academic hospital

National/Policy Context

Patient facing health IT tools such as patient portals are recognized as a potential mechanism to facilitate patient engagement and patient-centered care but are limited in use in the hospital setting.

Sources

Schnock KO, Snyder JE, Fuller TE, et al. Acute Care Patient Portal Intervention: Portal Use and Patient Activation. J Med Internet Res. 2019;21(7):e13336. doi:10.2196/13336