JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Using personal health records (PHRs) improves healthcare delivery and patient satisfaction. Despite their wide availability and multiple functionalities, PHRs and their functionalities are still underutilized by patients.

Objective:

We seek to understand factors that lead to patient engagement through multiple PHR functionalities. We provide recommendations that could lead to higher patients’ utilization of PHRs.

Methods:

Using data from the Health Information National Trends Survey 5 cycle 3 (N = 2093), we performed descriptive statistics and used a chi-square test to check the association between the demographic variables and app use for accessing medical records. We further conducted a multivariable regression analysis to examine the association between access type and portal functionalities utilization, including the moderation effects of age groups.

Results:

Results show that accessing personal health records using a mobile health application is positively associated with greater patient utilization of access capabilities (B = 0.52, p < 0.001), patient-provider interaction capabilities (B = 0.24, p < 0.01), and patient-personal health information interaction capabilities (B = 0.23, p < 0.01). Patients are more likely to interact with their records and their providers when accessing their electronic medical records using a mobile health app. The impacts of mobile health application usage fade with age for tasks consisting of viewing, downloading and transmitting medical results to a third party (B = -0.43, p < 0.01), but not for patient-provider (B = 0.05, p > 0.05) or patient-personal health information (B = -0.15, p > 0.05) interaction tasks.

Conclusions:

The current findings provide insights on how to increase engagement with diverse PHR functionalities for different age groups and thus improve healthcare delivery and patient satisfaction.