Love ‘em or hate ‘em, portal messages have become a big part of the communication between many patients and their healthcare teams. The UCSF rad onc department took a look at 25K+ patients treated in their department from 2014-2023 to see if they could measure indications of whether portal communication potentially influenced health outcomes. Perhaps it's not surprising that the roughly half of patients who communicated with their radiation oncologists via portal messaging had longer survival times. Granted this cohort was more likely to have GU and H&N primaries, to be White, and to have Medicare versus Medicaid government insurance. Interestingly, the only predictor of physician engagement in portal messaging was being female (OR 1.47). Regardless of the factors at play, this supports compensating physicians for time spent on portal messages, preferably as bonuses in a bundled payment model that would come from insurers rather than patients’ pockets. | Alexander, Int J Radiat Oncol Biol Phys 2024
