WASHINGTON – Inflammatory bowel disease patients may love web-based portals that allow them to interact with their doctors and records, but it does not seem to reduce their trips to the doctor.
“There was actually no decrease in office visits or phone encounters with patients that are utilizing MyChart [a web-based patient portal],” said Alexander Hristov, MD, a resident at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, in a video interview at the annual Digestive Disease Week®. “So in fact, the patients that had MyChart use were also the patients that were calling in more frequently and visiting the clinic more frequently, which is interesting because we did not see that there was an offset for emergency room visits or hospitalizations.”
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Out of the 616 total patients with either Crohn’s disease (355 patients) or ulcerative colitis (261 patients) analyzed in the study, 28% used MyChart. MyChart users also had higher number of prednisone prescriptions, compared with nonusers (51.9% vs. 40.8%, P = .01). There was no difference between MyChart users and nonusers for emergency room visits (P = .11) or hospitalizations (P = .16).
Interestingly, most messages sent via MyChart were for administrative reasons (54%), with both symptoms (28%) and education (18%) lagging behind.
Even though patients seem to like the portal, there is no billable time set aside for physicians to add the data for patients to access or respond to patient comments and requests through the portal. Unless MyChart can be shown to improve outcomes in some way, it is only an added burden for physicians.
Dr. Hristov mentioned that further work should be done to understand how web-based portals like MyChart can help both doctors and patients utilize this technology.
“We want to see the actual, measurable clinical outcomes of MyChart use,” he said. “So we want to set up a protocol where we can actually have measurable statistics looking at disease activity, inflammatory markers, and is there an impact that we are having on the patients disease course.”
Dr. Hristov had no financial disclosures to report.
SOURCE: Hristov A et al. Gastroenterology. 2018 May. doi: 0.1016/S0016-5085(18)32737-9.
