Adoption Strategies for Electronic Patient Portals: Employing Advanced Data Mining and Analytics.

Patient portals are becoming increasingly available at medical institutions, worldwide. Reporting of patient portal adoption strategies is scarce. A multi-institutional health network in Toronto, Canada is seeing great success with its portal adoption by patients, with an annual adoption rate of almost 65%. In the literature, annually adoption rates in Canada range between 5% and 10%. This significant difference and high adoption is attributed to a multifactorial approach that includes a dedicated operations team to engage with patients and staff, a co-design approach for portal development and more recently, new data-driven strategies to affirm and recommend promotion approaches. Advanced data mining and analytics are promising tools to help improve the adoption rate. This paper will describe five analytics tools used to describe and potentially improve patient portal adoption rates.