Increased Patient Portal Usage Following an Educational Intervention

The patient portal, a Health Information Technology (HIT) tool, was created to help patients become engaged with their health and health information to improve health outcomes. The practice problem was the low patient portal use and lack of nurses’ knowledge of patient HIT tools at an urban ambulatory clinic in the northeastern United States. The practice-focused question explored whether an educational intervention with the care coordination team (CCT) would increase prescription refill requests and facilitate patient-provider communications via the patient portal. The 2 frameworks used for the project were Knowles’s adult learning theory and Lewin’s theory of change. The preintervention data were collected from an electronic-medical-record-generated report that provided portal usage for the 6 months prior to the intervention. The CCT members were trained on teaching and modeling portal use from the perspective of the patients. A checklist of steps was created and given to the CCT to be used in patients’ education. Postintervention reports showed that the patient portal usage for patient-provider communication increased by 165%. The prescription refill requests did not show an increase because medication used to treat chronic conditions were typically supplied for 6 months. The implications of this project for social change include the potential for providers to improve how they interact with their patients by incorporating patient portal education inpatient visits