How outcomes are achieved through patient portals: a realist review.

CONCLUSIONS: Patient portals may impact clinical outcomes and health service delivery through multiple mechanisms. Given the relative uniformity of evaluation contexts, we were not able to detect patterns in how patient portals work in different contexts. Nonetheless, it appears from the overwhelming proportion of patient portal evaluations coming from integrated health service networks, that these networks provide more fertile contexts for patient portals to be effective. To improve the understanding of how patient portals work, future evaluations of patient portals should capture information about mechanisms and context that influence their outcomes. PMID: 24503882 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: J Am Med Inform Assoc Source Type: research