"I Want to Keep the Personal Relationship With My Doctor": Understanding Barriers to Portal Use among African Americans and Latinos.

Background: Despite the widespread implementation of electronic health records (EHRs), there is growing evidence that racial/ethnic minority patients do not use portals as frequently as non-Hispanic whites to access their EHR information online. This differential portal use could be problematic for health care disparities since early evidence links portal use to better outcomes.

Objective: We sought to understand specific barriers to portal use among African American and Latino patients at Kaiser Permanente, which has had a portal in place for over a decade, and broad uptake among the patient population at large.

Refilling medications through an online patient portal: consistent improvements in adherence across racial/ethnic groups.

Objective: Online patient portals are being widely implemented; however, no studies have examined whether portals influence health behaviors or outcomes similarly across patient racial/ethnic subgroups. We evaluated longitudinal changes in statin adherence to determine whether racial/ethnic minorities initiating use of the online refill function in patient portals had similar changes over time compared with Whites.

Methods: We examined a retrospective cohort of diabetes patients who were existing patient portal users.

If you build it, will they come? The Kaiser Permanente model of online health care.

Although health care has lagged behind other industries in adopting online services, consumers will embrace online tools such as obtaining results of lab tests, scheduling appointments, and doctor-patient e-mail. Many challenges in using health care technology faced by small and midsize medical practices can be overcome by examining how Kaiser Permanente and other large integrated health systems handle the same problems. Collaboration among providers, combined with government support, will help advance widespread consumer adoption of online health care.