Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Observational Study
. 2024 Jul;72(7):2140-2147.
doi: 10.1111/jgs.18841. Epub 2024 Feb 27.

Patient portal messages to support an age-friendly health system for persons with dementia

Kelly T Gleason  1 , Danielle Powell  2 , Athena P DeGennaro  1 , Mingche M J Wu  2 , Talan Zhang  2 , Jennifer L Wolff  2
Affiliations
Observational Study

Patient portal messages to support an age-friendly health system for persons with dementia

Kelly T Gleason et al. J Am Geriatr Soc. 2024 Jul.

Abstract

Background: Patient portal secure messaging can support age-friendly dementia care, yet little is known about care partner use of the portal and how message concerns relate to age-friendly issues.

Methods: We conducted a two-part observational study. We first assessed the feasibility of automating care partner identification from patient portal messages by developing and testing a natural language processing (NLP) rule-based classification system from portal messages of 1973 unique patients 65 and older. Second, two independent reviewers manually coded a randomly selected sample of portal messages for 987 persons with dementia to identify the frequency of expressed needs from the 4M domains of an Age-Friendly Health System (medications, mentation, mobility, and what matters).

Results: A total of 267 (13.53%) of 1973 messages sent from older adults' portal accounts were identified through manual coding as sent by a nonpatient author. The NLP model performance to identify nonpatient authors demonstrated an AUC of 0.90. Most messages sent from the accounts of persons with dementia contained content relevant to the 4Ms (60%, 601/987), with the breakdown as follows: medications-36% (357/987), mobility-10% (101/987), mentation-16% (153/987), and what matters (aligning care with specific health goals and care preferences)-21%, 207/987.

Conclusions: Patient portal messaging offers an avenue to identify care partners and meet the informational needs of persons with dementia and their care partners.

Keywords: age‐friendly; dementia; patient portal.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors have no conflicts of interest or competing interests to declare.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve for training, testing, and final natural language processing model
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Steitz BD, Unertl KM, Levy MA. An Analysis of Electronic Health Record Work to Manage Asynchronous Clinical Messages among Breast Cancer Care Teams. Appl Clin Inform. Aug 2021;12(4):877–887. doi: 10.1055/s-0041-1735257 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Lieu TA, Altschuler A, Weiner JZ, et al. Primary Care Physicians' Experiences With and Strategies for Managing Electronic Messages. JAMA Netw Open. Dec 2 2019;2(12):e1918287. doi: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.18287 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Crotty BH, Mostaghimi A, O'Brien J, Bajracharya A, Safran C, Landon BE. Prevalence and Risk Profile Of Unread Messages To Patients In A Patient Web Portal. Appl Clin Inform. 2015;6(2):375–82. doi: 10.4338/ACI-2015-01-CR-0006 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Borre ED, Nicholas MW. The disproportionate burden of electronic health record messages with image attachments in dermatology. J Am Acad Dermatol. Feb 2022;86(2):492–494. doi: 10.1016/j.jaad.2021.09.026 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. In: Stroud C, Larson EB, eds. Meeting the Challenge of Caring for Persons Living with Dementia and Their Care Partners and Caregivers: A Way Forward. 2021. The National Academies Collection: Reports funded by National Institutes of Health. - PubMed

Publication types