Abstract
Background: Patient portal is an emerging healthcare technology providing patients with real-time access to personal health information. Opal, a person-centred patient portal mobile phone application developed by the Opal Health Informatics Group (O-HIG) at the Research Institute of the Â鶹AV Health Centre (RI-MUHC) and funded by Quebec SmartCare Consortium (QSCC), has been released to cancer patients at the Cedars Cancer Centre since 2018. However, there is a lack of quantitative evidence on the benefits of Opal for healthcare utilization, operational efficiencies, and cost savings from portal use in the organizational context. To fill the gap, this project aims to quantify the initial impact of the Opal patient portal on operational and health-economic outcomes at the Cedars Cancer Centre.
Methods: Patient-level data from a variety of sources are linked using patient Medical Record Number (MRN) and analyzed. The primary method is to use propensity score matching (PSM) to construct a matched cohort that compares operational outcomes and clinical resource utilization between Opal users and non-users, while controlling for potentially confounding measured variables. Additionally, a waiting room survey is designed to provide additional information beyond the retrospective patient-level data alone and support the establishment of quality improvement initiatives for Opal. A literature review was first conducted to synthesize evidence on the assessment of the impact of electronic patient portals and identify gaps that need further research between May 9th and May 13th, 2022.
Results: Previous findings on the association between portal use and healthcare utilization are inconclusive and few studies directly assessed the cost savings from portal adoption. Data linkage was completed using currently available datasets and a trade-off table was created for propensity score matching and analyses of outcomes. The waiting room survey has been pretested on three patients and is in the process of being finalized.
Discussion: Since the project is still ongoing, the next step will be to complete the selection of appropriate covariates to generate propensity scores for matching Opal users with non-users, preparing for analyses of the planned outcomes, and to finalize the survey to collect patients’ responses.