Impact of E-Visits on Emergency Departments and Urgent Care Centers

Many studies have attempted to understand the utilization and adoption of patient portals and its effects on healthcare delivery and clinical services. However, it is still unclear whether the use of an online patient portal has any impact on the usage of emergency departments or urgent care centers. In this research, we analyzed three years of cumulative data of patients’ portal usage and the number of visits to emergency departments and urgent care centers. We investigated the relationship between the frequencies of E-visits and visits to emergency department and urgent care centers. We also analyzed the effect of age, gender, race, ethnicity, number of medical problems, and patient portal usage statistics, on the utilization of healthcare facilities. The dataset used in this research was provided by a leading national healthcare provider, and it includes more than 1,142,691 patient records.