With our first year of web portal use well behind us I started looking for practical ways to begin mining some data to get some basic statistical observations regarding patient use of web portal. As with all new undertakings in health IT this was far more difficult and cumbersome than it should have been. Nonetheless I got a few interesting observations documented over the past couple of days. I did not do an exhausting review but I don’t think data like this exist anywhere else.
I was curious about what proportion of our network’s new patients have used the web portal over the past 6 months. Overall 22% of our new patients used the web portal for clinical data entry. This differs significantly from my subjective observation that about half of my new patients were using the portal; this data includes all 19 of our network physicians, not just my own. I am in the process of looking at my patients only.
The breakdown by age is here – the first table – web portal figure 1
Portal use is very steady at around 25% through age 65 years. Use among pediatric patients shows parents are just as willing to use the portal for their children as they are for themselves. It is reasonable to expect portal use to drop with increasing age but I didn’t expect 65 year olds to be using the portal as much as 25 year olds. Portal use among patients in their 70’s and 80’s is quite respectable. The bump in use in patients over 90 years of age is interesting but likely to be a statistical illusion due to the very small absolute numbers in those age brackets.
The second table shows the same data expressed as raw numbers rather than percentages. All our new patients, regardless of portal use, tend to be from age 40 to 70 years.