Study: Willingness To Use PHRs Not Linked to Age, Education, Income

Age, education and income level are not accurate indicators of patients’  willingness to adopt personal health records, according to a study published in the journal Perspectives in Health Information Management, FierceHealthIT reports.

Study Details

For the study, researchers from the University of Central Florida surveyed  562 patients at a physician practice that was considering offering PHRs.

The eight-question surveys aimed to evaluate patients’ perceived ability  to:

• Access health information online;
• Understand their medical information; and
• Use their online data to make health care decisions.

Findings Related to Demographics

The study found that 74% of surveyed patients expressed willingness to use a  PHR (Hall, FierceHealthIT, 10/15). It also found that:

• Among respondents ages 56 through 70, 73% said they would use a PHR (Noblin  et al., Perspectives in Health Information  Management, Fall 2012);
• Among respondents with a high school education or less, 71% said they would  use a PHR; and
• Among respondents earning less than $20,000 annually, 75% said they would  use a PHR.

The findings do not support the idea that older, less educated and  lower-income patients would be less willing to adopt PHRs than other patients,  according to FierceHealthIT.

Findings Related to Health Literacy

However, the study did identify differences between patients who were willing  to use PHRs and those who said they would not use the tools. It found that:

• 76% of patients who were willing to use PHRs said they knew how to use the  Internet to answer health questions, compared with 48% of patients who were not  interested in PHRs;
• 72% of patients who were willing to use PHRs said they knew how to use  health information found online, compared with 41% of patients who were not  interested in PHRs; and
• 50% of patients who were willing to use PHRs said they could tell the  difference between high-quality and low-quality online health resources,  compared with 24% of patients who were not interested in PHRs  (FierceHealthIT, 10/15).

Source: iHealthBeat

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