Implementation and outcomes of a digital onboarding taskforce in the acute care setting

Use of digital health technology can improve patient health outcomes; however, not all patients have the knowledge and skills to download a health app and access a patient portal. Providing digital onboarding support to hospitalized patients has potential to overcome some barriers to accessing needed education in the community, including both having the time and a location to receive education. To address this, our team developed the Jefferson Digital Onboarding Taskforce (JeffDOT), a group of staff and students who approach hospitalized patients and provide one-on-one teaching on how to sign up for and use a patient portal.

This descriptive study examined the implementation and preliminary outcomes of JeffDOT. We collected patient demographics and assessed health literacy, digital health readiness, and empowerment using the patient portal after patients received individualized support with portal enrollment.

We enrolled 343 hospitalized patients from a large academic medical center in the U.S. in their patient portal. Almost half of the sample (49%) was older than 55 years, 56% were male, 34% were Black, and 19% spoke Spanish at home. After receiving individualized support from the JeffDOT team, the majority of patients (84%) reported that they felt empowered to use the portal and almost half reported that they would be very interested in additional basic computer skills training if offered by the hospital.

Our findings suggest that supporting hospitalized patients with enrollment into a health portal using a primarily student, volunteer-staffed model is feasible and acceptable to patients. Future research should focus on the impact of JeffDOT on patient outcomes and health behaviors.