The Role of Access Type and Age Group in the Breadth of Use of Patient Portals: Observational Study

Background: Health care delivery and patient satisfaction are improved when patients engage with their medical information through patient portals. Despite their wide availability and multiple functionalities, patient portals and their functionalities are still underused. Objective: We seek to understand factors that lead to patient engagement through multiple portal functionalities. We provide recommendations that could lead to higher patients’ usage of their portals. Methods: Using data from the Health Information National Trends Survey 5, Cycle 3 (N=2093), we performed descriptive statistics and used a chi-square test to analyze the association between the demographic variables and the use of mobile health apps for accessing medical records. We further fitted a generalized linear model to examine the association between access type and the use of portal functionalities. We further examined the moderation effects of age groups on the impact of access type on portal usage. Results: Our results show that accessing personal health records using a mobile health app is positively associated with greater patient usage of access capabilities (β=.52; P<.001), patient-provider interaction capabilities (β=.24, P=.006), and patient–personal health information interaction capabilities (β=.23, P=.009). Patients are more likely to interact with their records and their providers when accessing their electronic medical records using a mobile health app. The impacts of mobile health app usage fade with age for tasks consisting of viewing, downloading, and transmitting medical results to a third party (β=–.43, P=.005), but not for those involving patient-provider interaction (β=.05, P=.76) or patient–personal health information interaction (β=–.15, P=.19). Conclusions: These findings provide insights on how to increase engagement with diverse portal functionalities for different age groups and thus improve health care delivery and patient satisfaction.