Nearly half of patient portal registrations at an Amsterdam academic medical center between 2015 and 2016 were from adults age 56 years and older, according to a study published in September in Digital Health.
Despite their ability to sign up for the service, however, many older adults experienced ease-of-use issues and had higher expectations of content within the portal and patient/provider communication through it, researchers found.
They surveyed a group of 131 older adults who had registered for the portal and found that 22% reported usability problems, including an inability to review all test results on one page. This created a challenge of seeing an overview of the pattern of test values over time, users complained.
Some respondents also criticized the two-factor-authentication login system, and the number of passwords and codes it required them to remember.
Several older adults also experienced a lack of prompt provider responses to patient-sent messages through the portal, said Gaby Anne Wildenbos, Ph.D., a researcher at University of Amsterdam, a patient portal project coordinator, and the study’s lead author.
To encourage more seniors — both those living at home and those in a long-term care community — to engage more frequently with patient portals, the authors urged designers to investigate the use of secure and user-friendly authentication options that may better suit seniors. Those could include using biometrics, such as photos of patients’ faces, records of their voices, or images of their fingerprints during authentication.
Wildenbos also recommended that nursing home staff become knowledgeable about what the patient portal offers in terms of medical information and communication with providers. They should provide clear instructions to residents on how to log in and use the portal, and offer technical support on an ongoing basis, she added.
“Another option could be to have peer sessions on portal use, in which older adults can help each other access the portal,” Wildenbos said.
From the November 2018 Issue of McKnight's Long-Term Care News
