Patient-Portal Compared with Supplemental In-Office Tablet Screening for Health-Related Social Needs in Primary Care.

Background: Screening for health-related social needs (HRSN) has become more widespread but the best method of delivering the screening tool is not yet known.

Objective: Describe HRSN screening completion rate, specifically portal-based and in-person tablet-based screening.

Design: Cross-sectional retrospective observational study.

Participants: Adults age 18 or older who had a non-acute primary care visit at one of three internal medicine primary care clinics at a large, urban, academic medical center between July 2022 and July 2023.

Main Measures: We identified the proportion of individuals who were screened using the HRSN questionnaire, whether screening was completed by patient-portal or tablet, as well as the degree of burden of HRSN. Using the electronic health record, we explored associations between sociodemographic characteristics and HRSN attributes.

Key Results: Our study included 24,597 patients, of whom 37% completed the HRSN questionnaire. A smaller proportion of Black/African American patients and those with Medicaid insurance completed the questionnaire, yet they comprised a greater percentage of those who screened positive for unmet HRSN (p ≤ 0.001). Most patients completed the questionnaire by patient-portal (86.1%) compared with in-office tablets (14.0%). A larger proportion of those who completed screening by tablet screened positive for HRSN. Of all patients screened, 21.8% were positive for an unmet HRSN and 11.5% had more than one unmet HRSN.

Conclusions: A majority of patients are not being screened for HRSN and results illustrate disparities when screening patients for HRSN through portal-based compared with supplemental in-office tablet-based screening. Prevalence of unmet HRSN varied by demographics such as race and insurance status.