Study Suggests Disparities in Online Patient Portal Responses Based on Race
Have you ever sent your doctor a question through an online patient portal? The type of response you get may differ depending on your race, a recent study suggests.
For the study, published in JAMA Network Open Monday, researchers examined patient portal message responses from more than 39,000 patients at Boston Medical Center in 2021, including the rates at which medical advice requests were responded to and the types of health care professionals that responded.
"When patients who belong to minoritized racial and ethnic groups sent these messages, the likelihood of receiving any care team response was similar, but the types of health care professionals that responded differed," the authors wrote.
Black patients were nearly 4 percentage points less likely to receive a response from an attending physician, and about 3 percentage points more likely to receive a response from a registered nurse.
"Similar, but smaller, differences were observed for Asian and Hispanic patients," the authors added.
Why is this happening? The study points to several possibilities, ranging from implicit bias to message content and physician time constraints.
Researchers have raised concerns that emails from minority patients may not be prioritized for physician response when sent through patient portals. This issue is compounded by disparities in "health literacy," which refers to individuals' ability to find, understand, and use health information for decision-making.
According to the authors, lower health literacy levels could impact the types of requests made by patients through the portal and how these requests are communicated.
Black individuals in the U.S. have long faced challenges in accessing equitable healthcare. Leigh-Ann Webb, an emergency room doctor and assistant professor at the University of Virginia, highlighted the systemic inequalities within the American healthcare system, stating that it is not designed to serve everyone equally.
Black Americans face a disproportionate burden of chronic health conditions like diabetes and asthma. They also have the highest mortality rate for all cancers compared to other racial groups and an infant mortality rate nearly double the national average. Black women are about three times more likely than White women to die during childbirth, as reported by the CDC.
Despite the potential benefits of health care technology, such as the use of AI, there are concerns that these advancements could exacerbate existing racial biases in medical care that have persisted for generations.
