Designing for Demographics-Optimizing the Usability of Patient Portals

Patient portals facilitate patients’ access to their own health information and the ability to communicate with their providers. Despite these benefits, portals are not widely used, as they are often poorly designed and do not provide a patient’s information in an intuitive format. Additionally, patient needs vary by demographics and health status, which have not been adequately characterized to improve patient portal design. Identifying these requirements may result in a more effective design for patient portals, which will assist in bridging existing utilization gaps. For this study, the research team hypothesized that preferences for patient portals differ not only across subgroups of nonusers and users but also between subgroups of users, such as regular and infrequent users.

The specific aims were as follows:

• Survey population subgroups with varying levels of patient portal use to characterize engagement and identify preferences.
• Develop patient portal user personas to meet the needs of diverse patients.
• Disseminate standard design and development documents and lessons learned.

The research team used quantitative methods to analyze patient portal user subpopulations and stratify patient portal users from nonusers. The analysis involved a large cross-sectional survey of diverse portal users and nonusers by sampling participants from a novel crowd-sourcing platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk. Medstar’s patient portal activity and usage pre- and post-onset COVID-19 pandemic were also extracted and analyzed.

The results of this study demonstrated the presence of gaps in patient portal utilization by patient subpopulations. In addition, researchers found that having a primary care provider, a chronic disorder, or a disability is associated with having a patient portal account. The study suggests that healthcare systems, providers, and patient portal designers should increase patient accessibility and usage of patient portal platforms. The implications of the study shed light on a promising method of reducing inequalities in health outcomes among communities that have not historically used patient portals. The researchers will use the findings from both surveys to build patient portal user personas for future research.