Who uses the patient internet portal?
Stoneman Center for Quality Improvement, Division of General Medicine and Primary Care, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA. saul_weingart@dfci.harvard.edu OBJECTIVE: Although the patient Internet portal is a potentially transformative technology, there is little scientific information about the demographic and clinical characteristics of portal enrollees and the features that they access. DESIGN: We describe two pilot studies of a comprehensive Internet portal called PatientSite. These pilots include a prospective one-year cohort study of all patients who enrolled in April 2003 and a case-control study in 2004 of enrollees and nonenrollees at two hospital-based primary care practices. MEASUREMENTS: The cohort study tracked patient enrollment and features in PatientSite that enrollees accessed, such as laboratory and radiology results, prescription renewals, appointment requests, managed care referrals, and clinical messaging. The cas
