Journal
JOURNAL OF MEDICAL INTERNET RESEARCH
Volume 20, Issue 2, Pages -Publisher
JMIR PUBLICATIONS, INC
DOI: 10.2196/jmir.8372
Keywords
electronic health records; personal health information; patient portals; shared decision making; doctor patient relationship
Funding
- Canada Research Chair in Medical Decision Sciences
- Canadian Institutes of Health Research
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Background: Electronic patient portals provide a new method for sharing personal medical information with individual patients. Objective: Our aim was to review utilization patterns of the largest online patient portal in Canada's largest city. Methods: We conducted a 4-year time-trend analysis of aggregated anonymous utilization data of the MyChart patient portal at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Ontario, Canada, from January 1, 2012, through December 31, 2015. Prespecified analyses examined trends related to day (weekend vs weekday), season (July vs January), year (2012 vs 2015), and an extreme adverse weather event (ice storm of December 20-26, 2013). Primary endpoints included three measures of patient portal activity: registrations, logins, and pageviews. Results: We identified 32,325 patients who registered for a MyChart account during the study interval. Time-trend analysis showed no sign of attenuating registrations over time. Logins were frequent, averaged 734 total per day, and showed an increasing trend over time. Pageviews mirrored logins, averaged about 3029 total per day, and equated to about 5 pageviews during the average login. The most popular pageviews were clinical notes, followed by laboratory results and medical imaging reports. All measures of patient activity were lower on weekends compared to weekdays (P<.001) yet showed no significant changes related to seasons or extreme weather. No major security breach, malware attack, or software failure occurred during the study. Conclusions: Online patient portals can provide a popular and reliable system for distributing personal medical information to active patients and may merit consideration for hospitals.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available