A tale of two patients - How did the pandemic impact patients’ usage of health portals

Abstract

Objective: The study examines whether patient health portal usage significantly increased during the COVID-19 pandemic between 2019 and 2022.
Methods: In order to measure patient usage of patient portals before and during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, this study used the Health Information National Trends Survey results for 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. It was compared, using a least square regression model, to see if there was a significant relationship between increased use of telehealth, the usage of health portals, and the number of times seen by a regular healthcare provider.
Results: The number of patients who saw their health care provider thrice a year and used their patient portal pre- and postpandemic increased. However, the overall increase in patients using their portals before and during the first two years of the pandemic remains below 50%.
Conclusions: Overall, the pandemic increased patients’ use of telemedicine but only significantly increased their usage of patient portals for those patients who saw their provider three or more times a year. These findings indicate that more interaction with providers might impact future portal usage.

Keywords

Health portals / Telehealth / COVID-19 / Pandemic

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

NA.

FUNDING

No funding was given or received for this study.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST DISCLOSURE

The author declares there is no conflicts of interest.

INFORMED CONSENT

Obtained.

ETHICS APPROVAL

The Publication Ethics Committee of the Sciedu Press. The journal’s policies adhere to the Core Practices established by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

PROVENANCE AND PEER REVIEW

Not commissioned; externally double-blind peer reviewed.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

Data availability HINTS is available at this site (which is the terms of use) https://hints.cancer.gov/data/download-data.aspx

DATA SHARING STATEMENT

No additional data are available.

OPEN ACCESS

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

COPYRIGHTS

Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s), with first publication rights granted to the journal.

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