{"doi":"10.2196/35187","title":"Patient Portal Messaging for Asynchronous Virtual Care During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Retrospective Analysis","abstract":"BACKGROUND: During the COVID-19 pandemic, patient portals and their message platforms allowed remote access to health care. Utilization patterns in patient messaging during the COVID-19 crisis have not been studied thoroughly. In this work, we propose characterizing patients and their use of asynchronous virtual care for COVID-19 via a retrospective analysis of patient portal messages. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to perform a retrospective analysis of portal messages to probe asynchronous patient responses to the COVID-19 crisis. METHODS: We collected over 2 million patient-generated messages (PGMs) at Mayo Clinic during February 1 to August 31, 2020. We analyzed descriptive statistics on PGMs related to COVID-19 and incorporated patients' sociodemographic factors into the analysis. We analyzed the PGMs on COVID-19 in terms of COVID-19-related care (eg, COVID-19 symptom self-assessment and COVID-19 tests and results) and other health issues (eg, appointment cancellation, anxiety, and depression). RESULTS: The majority of PGMs on COVID-19 pertained to COVID-19 symptom self-assessment (42.50%) and COVID-19 tests and results (30.84%). The PGMs related to COVID-19 symptom self-assessment and COVID-19 test results had dynamic patterns and peaks similar to the newly confirmed cases in the United States and in Minnesota. The trend of PGMs related to COVID-19 care plans paralleled trends in newly hospitalized cases and deaths. After an initial peak in March, the PGMs on issues such as appointment cancellations and anxiety regarding COVID-19 displayed a declining trend. The majority of message senders were 30-64 years old, married, female, White, or urban residents. This majority was an even higher proportion among patients who sent portal messages on COVID-19. CONCLUSIONS: During the COVID-19 pandemic, patients increased portal messaging utilization to address health care issues about COVID-19 (in particular, symptom self-assessment and tests and results). Trends in message usage closely followed national trends in new cases and hospitalizations. There is a wide disparity for minority and rural populations in the use of PGMs for addressing the COVID-19 crisis.","journal":"JMIR Human Factors","year":2022,"id":243263,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":34,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9547,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":875010,"name":"Aditya Khurana","orcid":"0000-0001-9148-9531","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":875011,"name":"George Mastorakos","orcid":"0000-0002-6155-6788","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":251079,"name":"Andrew Wen","orcid":"0000-0001-9090-8028","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":251073,"name":"Huan He","orcid":"0000-0003-1312-4195","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":49924,"name":"Liwei Wang","orcid":"0000-0001-9970-8604","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":251074,"name":"Sijia Liu","orcid":"0000-0001-9763-1164","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":393408,"name":"Yanshan Wang","orcid":"0000-0003-4433-7839","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":18261,"name":"Nansu Zong","orcid":"0000-0003-0066-9524","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":875012,"name":"Julie Prigge","orcid":"0000-0002-4709-4142","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":469783,"name":"Brian A. Costello","orcid":"0000-0003-1753-5928","position":10,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":63694,"name":"Nilay D. Shah","orcid":"0000-0002-8597-3447","position":11,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":447696,"name":"Henry H. Ting","orcid":"0000-0002-1495-584X","position":12,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":371399,"name":"Jungwei Fan","orcid":"0000-0001-6349-3752","position":13,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":418170,"name":"Christi A. Patten","orcid":"0000-0002-7194-8160","position":14,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":49903,"name":"Hongfang Liu","orcid":"0000-0003-2570-3741","position":15,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":444275,"name":"Ming Huang","orcid":"0000-0001-7367-3626","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":35,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:23:16.032700Z","pmid":"35171108","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}