Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Mar 8, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 12, 2019 - May 6, 2019
Date Accepted: May 23, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Integration of Hospital Room Hospitality Features onto Patient-Controlled Tablet Computers
ABSTRACT
Background:
Patient portals tethered to electronic heatlh records can improve patient experience, activation, and outcomes. However, adoption of inpatient portals have been challenging. One way to potentially increase inpatient portal usage is to integrate it with a room control app found on a common tablet computer.
Objective:
To perform a retrospective analysis of patient usage of a room control app found on tablet computers in patient rooms of our new inpatient tower.
Methods:
We identified all patients who were admitted for >24 hours to our new inpatient tower over a 90-day period. We then identified patients who used the room control app at least one time during their admission. We linked this data to patient demographics (including age, sex, and race) and admitting service. We then performed univariable and multivariable logistic regression to assess patterns of room control app usage.
Results:
A total of 3,411 patients were admitted over the course of study period and 2,242 (65.7%) used the room control app during their hospitalization. Compared to white patients, other/mixed/unknown race and Asian/Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders/American Indian race were significantly associated with increased use of the room control app in multivariable analysis. Increasing age was significantly associated with increased usage of the room control app. Usage of the room control app also varied by admitting services. Compared to general medicine, bone marrow transplant and general surgery patients had increased usage of the room control app. Conversely, critical care, medical specialty, neurology, surgical subspecialty, and obstetrics/gynecology were all associated with decreased usage of the room control app.
Conclusions:
Integrating room controls with inpatient portals offer a potential strategy to increase patient utilization of inpatient portals. Contrary to common belief, older patients may utilize tablet-enabled room controls just as often, if not more often, than younger patients. Certain admitting services, such as neurology and surgical subspecialties, may have had lower usage rates due to accessibility issues. Our study allows hospitals to tailor support for specific patient populations to increase room control app usage.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.