Suresh, Uday; Steitz, Bryan D.; Rosenbloom, S. Trent; Griffith, Kevin N.; Ancker, Jessica S. “Behavior shifts in patient portal usage during and after policy changes around test result delivery and notification.” AMIA … Annual Symposium proceedings. AMIA Symposium (2024): 1089-1098. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12099325/
Because of the 21st Century Cures Act, many hospitals and clinics now release test results to patients through online portals as soon as they are available. To understand how this change affected the way patients use these portals, we looked at electronic health record data before and after the policy went into effect, as well as after a later change that required patients to opt in to get notifications about new test results.
We found that once the Cures Act policy was put in place, more patients took action after viewing their test results—specifically, 4.5% more scheduled a new appointment and 4.5% more sent messages to their doctors. Later, when automatic notifications were turned off, 2.1% more patients scheduled appointments, but 0.8% fewer used telemedicine.
Our study shows that these policy changes led to real shifts in how patients respond to their test results—something that affects both patients’ efforts to get more information and the workload for clinicians.
Figure 1a, 1b, 1c.
Proportions of patients scheduling new appointments after accessing their test results prior to their clinician or after their clinician across the time periods of Cures Act compliance and the notification policy change. Plot 1a shows the proportion of all patients scheduling new appointments. Plots 1b and 1c show the proportion of patients scheduling new appointments who reviewed their results prior to their clinician and after their clinician, respectively.
