Use and Maturity of Electronic Patient Portals

This paper focuses on the adoption of electronic patient portals aimed at providing consumers with access to their own health records along with added functions aimed to improving convenience and access to care. A variety of Canadian patient portal implementations were analysed with evidence supplemented from international examples. Measures of adoption focused on active users and frequency of access. New portal implementations can achieve adoption at a rate of 5-10% of the overall population per year with larger, jurisdiction-wide deployments growing at a slower rate than smaller, more targeted deployments.