Clinicians Rewrite Vast Majority of AI-Drafted Portal Messages

Clinicians Rewrite Vast Majority of AI-Drafted Portal Messages

Researchers from Dartmouth found that when using large language models (LLMs) to draft responses to patient portal messages, clinicians may spend more time editing the AI responses than it would take to write them manually in the first place. Using more than 610,000 patient portal messages, the researchers created a training dataset of 144,000 clinician–patient conversations and tested multiple commercial and locally hosted LLMs against expert-written responses. In the study —which was presented at the …

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Is It Okay For Patients To Sneak a Peek In The Portal?

Is It Okay For Patients To Sneak a Peek In The Portal?

Waiting for test results can be a nerve-wracking experience for patients, and many are accessing results in a portal before their clinician even gets a look. In a nationally representative survey of 4,982 U.S. adults, 68.6% of respondents said they viewed their test results through a patient portal before hearing from their healthcare practitioner. Among those who viewed results first, 6.6% reported poor understanding of what the results showed and what they meant for their …

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Surprisingly, Portal Messaging Doesn’t Reduce In-Person Visits

Surprisingly, Portal Messaging Doesn’t Reduce In-Person Visits

A large-scale analysis of electronic health record data from more than 2,000 hospitals and 47,000 clinics found that secure patient portal messaging has become a component of outpatient care rather than a replacement for office visits, as published in JAMA. Investigators analyzed communication trends among active patients from 2020–2025 using nearly 8 billion office visits, portal messages, telephone encounters, and telehealth visits. Portal messages coming in from patients rose from 0.99 to 2.50 messages per …

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Leveraging Physician-Patient Relationships to Increase Patient Portal Access During an Urgent Care Visit

Leveraging Physician-Patient Relationships to Increase Patient Portal Access During an Urgent Care Visit

Urgent Message: Urgent care physicians can leverage the physician-patient relationship established during a visit to improve patient portal enrollment and use in a healthcare system. Sandy Wang, MD, MPH; Carolyn Stern, MD; Kevin Fiscella, MD, MPH; Amaya Sanders, BS; Erik Herbert, BS; Rosie Booker, BS; Tyra Barton, LPN; Mechelle Sanders, PhD Key Words: Electronic Health Records, Patient Portals, Urgent Care, Quality Improvement Abstract Background: Patient portals for accessing electronic health records are useful for easy …

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