[LINK] Most people aren’t accessing their medical records on their phones

[Kim Holburn]

https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/28/22698323/patient-portal-health-records-smartphone-app

> A new report shows that use of patient portals is steadily increasing
>
> Even as more and more people in the United States start to have access to their medical records online, most are still far more 
> likely to use their computers to log in to patient portals than a smartphone app, according to a new report 
> <https://www.healthit.gov/sites/default/files/page/2021-09/HINTS_2020_Consumer_Data_Brief.pdf> from the Office of the National 
> Coordinator for Health Information Technology.
>
> Almost 40 percent of US adults said that they accessed their health records through a patient portal in 2020, according to the 
> report, which analyzed data from the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) run by the National Cancer Institute. 
> That’s up from 25 percent in 2014.
>
> The survey only collected data from January through April 2020. That captures the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic when 
> doctors started to transition to telehealth — which often requires patients to log in through a portal.
>
> Of the people who did use a portal during the study period, around 40 percent said that they only or sometimes used a smartphone 
> app to access it. That lines up with a trend that started even before the pandemic. People have been slow to start using apps for 
> their health records, even though tech companies have been trying to generate interest for years.
>
> Apple, for example, has a health records section in its Health app, and it is available to patients at around 700 hospitals. It’s 
> hard to tell how many patients are actually using it: most hospitals aren’t tracking that data, a /MedCity News/ report 
> <https://medcitynews.com/2021/09/546989/> found, and Apple declined to tell /MedCity News/ how many people use the feature. But 
> one hospital that did have the information available, UC San Diego Health Sciences, said that only a small fraction of its 
> patients used Apple’s health records.
>
> Google is also working on a medical records tool 
> <https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/12/22379846/google-health-record-data-app-android>. It would be Google’s second attempt in this 
> space — it launched Google Health in 2008 before shutting the program down in 2012, citing low adoption.
>
> The report was not able to differentiate third-party apps, like the Apple feature, from apps directly distributed by a healthcare 
> organization or electronic medical record company. The Office of the National Coordinator told /The Verge/ that it is testing 
> additional questions that it hopes capture that nuance on the 2022 survey.
>
> The HINTS data also showed that more and more people are messaging their doctors through their portals. Just under 60 percent of 
> people in the study said they used the systems to send messages in 2020, up from 48 percent in 2017. Again, though, this data only 
> captures the very start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Other analysis of data from electronic health records in 2020 shows that use of 
> the messaging feature spiked around April 2020 
> <https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/17/22679239/patient-messages-health-record-epic-doctor-burnout>, and that it stayed high through 
> the rest of the year. Doctors say they’re overwhelmed by the volume.
>
> The reasons people /don’t /use their online medical records have stayed consistent: people said that they’d rather speak to a 
> doctor directly, and that they don’t see a need to access their medical records online. Around a quarter of people said they found 
> it difficult to log in, and 20 percent said they were uncomfortable with computers.
>
> The COVID-19 pandemic, though, accelerated efforts to make digital health and telemedicine more accessible. Doctors spent the past 
> year helping patients set up online access so that they could get the care they needed without leaving home. This report outlines 
> a baseline comfort level with online records before that work took place. Additional analysis on the rest of 2020 could help show 
> how successful those efforts may have been.
>
-- 
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
+61 404072753
mailto:kim at holburn.net  aim://kimholburn
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