Addressing Hospital Patient Information Needs Using a Personal Health Record Portal

This study will utilize an enhanced inpatient PHR portal to allow patients to view their care team, documented allergies and medications (home and hospital) as well as electronically document questions and concerns related to their care. These questions and concerns are visible to members of the patients' care teams within our commercial inpatient electronic health record (EHR). We will study the impact of the technology using a randomized trial of 426 cardiology and cardiothoracic surgery patients at Columbia University Medical Center in Upper Manhattan. We hypothesize that the use of the inpatient PHR portal will identify and address patients' information needs, improve patient activation, engagement and satisfaction, and encourage PHR use after hospital discharge. We also hypothesize that information entered by patients into the PHR portal will be useful to clinicians. There is no compensation for participating in this study.

The specific aims of the proposal are to:

Aim 1: Evaluate the impact of an inpatient PHR portal intervention using a randomized controlled trial. The primary outcomes will be patient activation, engagement and satisfaction. We will also determine whether access to the inpatient PHR portal is correlated with greater use of the PHR after hospital discharge.

Aim 2: Characterize information needs of hospital patients and assess clinicians' attitudes toward patient engagement in the hospital setting. We will analyze the questions and comments that patients record within the PHR portal application and assess the salience of patient-entered information to issues of care quality and safety. This aim will expand our previous work in taxonomy development and hazard and near-miss recognition. A survey will be administered to collect clinicians' perceptions of the barriers to and facilitators of system use. EHR documentation will be reviewed to assess whether patient-entered information was acknowledged by clinicians, and whether changes were made to the patient's plan of care as a result.