People who had access to their medical records online also came into their doctor’s office for more appointments and used the emergency room more often than those who didn’t log on, according to a US study.
Patient visits and calls tended to go up in the year after people started using the electronic records
That contradicts one theory supporting online access to health records, which says that if patients can look up their test results and put in for prescription refills online, they’ll make fewer unnecessary trips or calls to the office, saving both time and money.
The new report, which appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, questions whether online records always make care more efficient.
“I strongly believe that patients are going to find this very helpful and that it will be possible to use the personal health record in ways that do improve efficiency,” said David Bates, from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who co-wrote an editorial accompanying the study.
Researchers from Kaiser Permanente Colorado in Denver compared 44,321 health plan members who had access to their medical records and could e-mail their doctors to an equal number who didn’t use the online system.
The patients in each group were matched for age, gender, race and chronic diseases.
The researchers found that patient visits and calls tended to go up in the year after people started using the electronic records. But for those in the no-access group, measures of healthcare use typically declined or stayed constant compared to the year before.
Online users went to the doctor’s office an average 0.7 extra times each over the year and called an extra 0.3 times each, versus non-users. Their rate of after-hours clinic visits, ER trips and hospitalisations also rose in comparison, by an extra 11 to 20 visits and stays for every 1,000 patients a year.
If the same findings applied to a small group practice, a doctor with 1,000 patients who started using online records would have close to 10 extra clinic visits each week, according to Ted Palen from the Institute for Health Research at Kaiser Permanente Colorado and his colleagues.
The researchers said there are a few possible explanations for the “surprising” findings. It’s possible that online access allowed people to identify more health concerns, for example, or that the type of patients who sign up for online access are also the ones who are more likely to use in-person health services.
“Our findings suggest that the relationship between online access and utilisation is more complex than the simple substitution of online for in-person care suggested by earlier studies,” Palen’s team wrote.
Bates said the key to making healthcare more efficient using online records may be building in tools specifically designed for people with chronic diseases.
For example, one function could allow people with hypertension to regularly enter their blood pressure online after measuring it at home.
If it’s too high, they would be contacted by the system or their doctor – which could eliminate the need for those patients to come into the office regularly to have their blood pressure checked.