Mary E. Reed, DrPH

Telephone visits may offer a simple and convenient option to address patient primary care needs without raising safety concerns.

A scalable health system–wide emergency physician education and feedback initiative was associated with decreased opioid prescribing, in excess of background temporal decline.

Using a seamlessly shared inpatient-outpatient electronic health record was associated with greater rates of postdischarge follow-up delivered through telemedicine or laboratory monitoring and without an in-person office visit.

As technology applications in healthcare continue to grow, electronic health records are maturing, interoperability is developing, and patient-facing technology use is expanding.

Racial/ethnic minorities and patients living in poorer neighborhoods were more likely to access their personal health record exclusively with a mobile device.

Patients with higher out-of-pocket visit costs, such as co-payments and deductibles, initiated provider contact by e-mail more often. Patients report that e-mailing changed their care-seeking behaviors and improved overall health.

Patients with diabetes that are cared for by primary care teams with higher cohesion experienced greater EHR-related outcome improvements, compared with patients cared for by lower cohesion teams.