Why Won't Patients Embrace Portals?

A recent study tracked patients in 12 health systems across the country for 9 months (March – December 2018) and found that just 0.7% of patient portal users also downloaded their health record data using their phones (accounting for 0.1% of all health system patients, assuming standard adoption rates of the patient portals within those health systems).

Healthcare organizations (HCOs) and their vendors may be missing an opportunity to better engage patients if they ignore their portals and obsess over app downloads and adoption. If vendors make patient portals more palatable to patients, more enthusiastic app adoption could follow. Ensuring patients can easily access and utilize patient portals makes those patients more likely to use patient portal-adjacent offerings. However, patients continue to find portals hard to navigate and difficult to learn. This blog post will offer solutions for addressing each issue, hopefully allowing patients to benefit from the portals that provider organizations are working so hard to build.