Healthcare patient portal usage: Benefits, issues, and challenges

Abstract

The world is on the verge of rapid technological advancements, and acceptance. Healthcare is also influenced by recent innovations such as medical imaging and electronic patient health records. Thus, to maintain the patient's record in this digital era giant healthcare providers are adopting internet-based services such as patient portals that are portraying great results for patient involvement in this mechanism. However, it has been observed that patients, physicians, and healthcare providers are facing certain challenges to synch the health information cycle among them. Therefore, the focus of this study is to examine the interleaved issues, challenges, and benefits of healthcare patient portals. We have studied existing literature to retrieve our findings that accomplished the identified objective. We have found that patient portals are beneficial for maintaining and updating patients’ health histories at any time and can be shared across the healthcare network. However, physician acceptance and patient resistance are key challenges to implementing patient portals in healthcare settings.