Patients Message Providers More When Providers Reach Out

A new study has concluded that patients use secure electronic messaging more when their primary care providers initiate and respond to secure messages. To conduct the study, the research team worked a large database stocked with information on health care transactions and secure messaging records on 81,645 US Army soldiers. The data also included information from almost 3,000 clinicians with access to a patient portal system. The dataset encompassed the 4-year period between January 2011 and November 2014. The data, which appears in a paper published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, suggests that current provider-patient exchanges via secure messaging aren’t that common. For example, during the study period just 7 percent of patients initiated a secure message during a given month. Meanwhile, Providers initiated an average of 0.007 messages per patient each month, while responding to 0.09 messages per patient during a month. That being said, when physicians got more engaged with the messaging process, patients responded dramatically. Patients who knew their providers were responsive initiated a whopping 334 percent more secure messages than their baseline. Even among patients whose providers responded infrequently to their messages, the level at which they initiated messages to their clinicians was 254 percent higher than with PCPs who weren’t responding. (Oddly, when PCP response rates were at the “medium” level, patients increased messaging by 167 perc...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: Digital Health EHR Electronic Health Record Electronic Medical Record EMR Healthcare Patient Portal Practice Management Doctor Messaging Journal of Medical Internet Research Patient Engagement Patient Messaging Physician Messaging Source Type: blogs