A Systematic Analysis of Patient Portals Adoption, Acceptance and Usage: The Trajectory for Triple Aim?

Abstract

Personal Health Records (PHR), often known as patient portal, are consumer-centric tools that can strengthen consumers’ ability to actively manage their own health and healthcare. The incorporation of patient portals provides the promise to assist with Triple Aim and population health goals. Patient portals encourage patients to play a more active role in their healthcare by giving them more responsibility for maintaining a healthy lifestyle and managing chronic diseases and thus may provide a cost-effective way to improve quality of care. In this study, we extend the existing literature by using a data analytic approach to provide more insights in adopting mobile patient portals. Specifically, we aim to use topic modeling approach, LDA algorithm, to systematically analyze users’ feedback (i.e., online users’ reviews) from the actual use of a common mobile patient portal, Epic’s MyChart. To validate the extracted topics, we compared the results of LDA analysis with that of human analysis. Overall, the extracted topics revealed opportunities for improvement and to enhance the design of current basic portals to improve usage. Improved portal usage will move toward effective population health management and achievement of the triple aim goals.