Online Patient Portals for Healthcare Communication: The Case of Vera's Difficulty Practicing What She Preaches

Abstract

Patient portals are practitioner-provided, online environments, with various aff ordances for patients managing their health care, including direct messaging and sharing of information between patients and providers (Irizarry, Dabbs, & Curran, 2015). When utilized, patient portals have the potential to enable positive doctor–patient relationships and greater health outcomes (Kruse, Argueta, Lopez, & Nair, 2015). Patient portals blur two extraordinary important, digital forms, of health information: personal health records (PHRs) and electronic health records (EHRs; Turner et al., 2015). Initially, the notion of a PHR was that it was patient-owned and patient-maintained. Essentially, the fi le folder, full of printed health records, shifted into a digital realm, whereas EHRs were exclusively maintained by practitioners (Sittig & Wright, 2015). At the onset, these were established by patients, and various companies offered products for consumers to build and manage their PHRs (e.g., Google Health’s Personal Health Record Vault, which shut down in 2011).