Online Patient Access to Records May Boost Visits

By John Gever, Senior Editor
MedPage Today
Published: November 20, 2012


Patients with access to their physicians' electronic health record systems had more office visits, hospital admissions, and emergency room encounters than those without such access, researchers said.

Participants in a Kaiser Permanente program giving them access to their electronic records, including a secure email system for communicating with clinicians, showed significant increases in nearly all measures of healthcare utilization, relative to the period before they joined the program, Ted E. Palen, MD, PhD, MSPH, of Kaiser Permanente Colorado in Denver, and colleagues reported in the Nov. 20 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

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In an accompanying editorial, two researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston noted that the study findings stood in contrast to Kaiser investigations in other regions, which had found reductions in utilization associated with so-called patient portals to electronic health records.

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