Do you want to increase patient portal engagement and save time?

What can I do to improve patient portal enrollment and engagement?

These are some basic ideas, but many other strategies exist, such as provider engagement, education, process mapping, and cause-and-effect analysis in your own setting.

1. Autoenrollment via text message — Lowest cost, highest yield. Removes friction by sending enrollment offers directly to patients' phones. Produced the largest equity gains across all racial/ethnic groups at UCSF (Milanfar et al., 2024).
2. Embedded patient navigators — Multilingual navigators at check-in provide real-time enrollment. 74% activation rate; 99% of newly enrolled patients accessed the portal at least once (Matthews et al., 2023; Matthews et al., 2025).
3. One-on-one training — Hands-on demonstrations have the strongest evidence for increasing portal use in vulnerable populations, with 67% of studies showing significant increases (Rodriguez et al., 2023).

References

Matthews, A. K., Gumbs, C., Burke, L., et al. (2025). A description of the development and initial evaluation of a patient navigator delivered patient portal enrollment program. Patient Education and Counseling, 141, 109343. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2025.109343

Matthews, A. K., Steffen, A. D., Burke, L. A., Donenberg, G., Duangchan, C., Akufo, J., Opuada, H., Oyaluade, D., Vilona, B. H., Diaz, H., & Dodd, D. (2024). The Use of Navigators to Increase Patient Portal Enrollment among Patients in a Federally Qualified Health Care System. Ethnicity & disease, DECIPHeR(Spec Issue), 117–125. https://doi.org/10.18865/ed.DECIPHeR.117

Milanfar, L., Soulsby, W. D., Ling, N., et al. (2024). Automatic enrollment in patient portal systems mitigates the digital divide in healthcare: An interrupted time series analysis of an autoenrollment workflow intervention. Journal of Medical Systems, 48(1), 94. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-024-02114-7

Rodriguez, J. A., Charles, J. P., Bates, D. W., et al. (2023). Digital healthcare equity in primary care: Implementing an integrated digital health navigator. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 30(5), 965–970. https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocad015

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