The Annual Wellness Visit Health Risk Assessment: Potential of Patient Portal-Based Completion and Patient-Oriented Education and Support.

Background and Objectives: Patient portals are secure online platforms that allow patients to perform electronic health management tasks and engage in bidirectional information exchange with their care team. Some health systems administer Medicare Annual Wellness Visit (AWV) health risk assessments through the patient portal. Scalable opportunities from portal-based administration of risk assessments are not well understood. Our objective is 2-fold-to understand who receives vs misses an AWV and health risk assessment and explore who might be missed with portal-based administration. Research Design and Methods: This is an observational study of electronic medical record and patient portal data (10/03/2021-10/02/2022) for 12 756 primary care patients 66+ years from a large academic health system. Results: Two-thirds (n = 8420) of older primary care patients incurred an AWV; 81.0% of whom were active portal users. Older adults who were active portal users were more likely to incur AWV than those who were not, though portal use was high in both groups (81.0% with AWV vs 76.8% without; p < .001). Frequently affirmative health risk assessment categories included falls/balance concerns (44.2%), lack of a documented advanced directive (42.3%), sedentary behaviors (39.9%), and incontinence (35.1%). Mean number of portal messages over the 12-month observation period varied from 7.2 among older adults affirmative responses to concerns about safety at home to 13.8 for older adults who reported difficulty completing activities of daily living. Portal messaging varied more than 2-fold across affirmative health risk categories and were marginally higher with greater number affirmative (mean = 13.8 messages/year no risks; 19.6 messages/year 10+ risks). Discussion and Implications: Most older adults were active portal users-a group more likely to have incurred a billed AWV. Efforts to integrate AWV risk assessments in the patient portal may streamline administration and scalability for dissemination of tailored electronically mediated preventive care but must attend to equity issues.

Patient portal messages to support an age-friendly health system for persons with dementia.

BACKGROUND: Patient portal secure messaging can support age-friendly dementia care, yet little is known about care partner use of the portal and how message concerns relate to age-friendly issues. METHODS: We conducted a two-part observational study. We first assessed the feasibility of automating care partner identification from patient portal messages by developing and testing a natural language processing (NLP) rule-based classification system from portal messages of 1973 unique patients 65 and older. Second, two independent reviewers manually coded a randomly selected sample of portal messages for 987 persons with dementia to identify the frequency of expressed needs from the 4M domains of an Age-Friendly Health System (medications, mentation, mobility, and what matters). RESULTS: A total of 267 (13.53%) of 1973 messages sent from older adults' portal accounts were identified through manual coding as sent by a nonpatient author. The NLP model performance to identify nonpatient authors demonstrated an AUC of 0.90. Most messages sent from the accounts of persons with dementia contained content relevant to the 4Ms (60%, 601/987), with the breakdown as follows: medications-36% (357/987), mobility-10% (101/987), mentation-16% (153/987), and what matters (aligning care with specific health goals and care preferences)-21%, 207/987. CONCLUSIONS: Patient portal messaging offers an avenue to identify care partners and meet the informational needs of persons with dementia and their care partners.

Patient Portal Use during Home Health Care at an Academic Health System.

OBJECTIVES: To characterize patient portal use among older adults receiving skilled home health (HH) care. DESIGN: Retrospective cohort study. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS: Older adults (aged ≥65 years) who received HH care from a large, academic health system between 2017 to 2022 (n = 8409 HH episodes provided to n = 4878 unique individuals). METHODS: We captured individual and HH episode characteristics from the electronic health record and identified specific types and dates of portal use for those with an active patient portal. We calculated the proportion of episodes in which patients engaged in specific patient portal activities (eg, viewing test results, managing appointments, sending messages). We used multivariable logistic regression to model the odds of engaging in each activity as a function of patient and episode characteristics, and charted the timing of patient portal activities across the 60-day HH episode. RESULTS: The patient portal was used by older adults in more than half (58%) of the episodes examined. Among those using their portal account during an HH episode, 84% viewed test results, 77% managed an existing appointment, 72% managed medications, and 55% sent a message to a provider. Adjusted odds of portal use were higher among HH patients who were married (aOR: 1.77, P < .001), receiving HH post-COVID pandemic (aOR: 2.73, P < .001), and accessing HH following a hospitalization (aOR: 1.30, P < .001) and lower among those who were Black compared with white (aOR: 0.52, P < .001). Portal use, particularly viewing test results and clinical notes and managing existing appointments, was highest during the first 10 days of an HH episode, especially among patients referred following a hospitalization. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: HH patients use the patient portal to perform care management tasks and access clinical information. Study findings support opportunities to harness the patient portal to bridge information gaps and care coordination during HH care.

The Role of Place in Person- and Family-Oriented Long-Term Services and Supports.

Policy Points Little attention to date has been directed at examining how the long-term services and supports (LTSS) environmental context affects the health and well-being of older adults with disabilities. We develop a conceptual framework identifying environmental domains that contribute to LTSS use, care quality, and care experiences. We find the LTSS environment is highly associated with person-reported care experiences, but the direction of the relationship varies by domain; increased neighborhood social and economic deprivation are highly associated with experiencing adverse consequences due to unmet need, whereas availability and generosity of the health care and social services delivery environment are inversely associated with participation restrictions in valued activities. Policies targeting local and state-level LTSS-relevant environmental characteristics stand to improve the health and well-being of older adults with disabilities, particularly as it relates to adverse consequences due to unmet need and participation restrictions. CONTEXT: Long-term services and supports (LTSS) in the United States are characterized by their patchwork and unequal nature. The lack of generalizable person-reported information on LTSS care experiences connected to place of community residence has obscured our understanding of inequities and factors that may attenuate them. METHODS: We advance a conceptual framework of LTSS-relevant environmental domains, drawing on newly available data linkages from the 2015 National Health and Aging Trends Study to connect person-reported care experiences with public use spatial data. We assess relationships between LTSS-relevant environmental characteristic domains and person-reported care adverse consequences due to unmet need, participation restrictions, and subjective well-being for 2,411 older adults with disabilities and for key population subgroups by race, dementia, and Medicaid enrollment status. FINDINGS: We find the LTSS environment is highly associated with person-reported care experiences, but the direction of the relationship varies by domain. Measures of neighborhood social and economic deprivation (e.g., poverty, public assistance, social cohesion) are highly associated with experiencing adverse consequences due to unmet care needs. Measures of the health care and social services delivery environment (e.g., Medicaid Home and Community-Based Service Generosity, managed LTSS [MLTSS] presence, average direct care worker wage, availability of paid family leave) are inversely associated with experiencing participation restrictions in valued activities. Select measures of the built and natural environment (e.g., housing affordability) are associated with participation restrictions and lower subjective well-being. Observed relationships between measures of LTSS-relevant environmental characteristics and care experiences were generally held in directionality but were attenuated for key subpopulations. CONCLUSIONS: We present a framework and analyses describing the variable relationships between LTSS-relevant environmental factors and person-reported care experiences. LTSS-relevant environmental characteristics are differentially relevant to the care experiences of older adults with disabilities. Greater attention should be devoted to strengthening state- and community-based policies and practices that support aging in place.

Use of the patient portal among older adults with diagnosed dementia and their care partners.

INTRODUCTION: Care partners are at the forefront of dementia care, yet little is known about patient portal use in the context of dementia diagnosis. METHODS: We conducted an observational cohort study of date/time-stamped patient portal use for a 5-year period (October 3, 2017-October 2, 2022) at an academic health system. The cohort consisted of 3170 patients ages 65+ with diagnosed dementia with 2+ visits within 24 months. Message authorship was determined by manual review of 970 threads involving 3065 messages for 279 patients. RESULTS: Most (71.20%) older adults with diagnosed dementia were registered portal users but far fewer (10.41%) had a registered care partner with shared access. Care partners authored most (612/970, 63.09%) message threads, overwhelmingly using patient identity credentials (271/279, 97.13%). DISCUSSION: The patient portal is used by persons with dementia and their care partners. Organizational efforts that facilitate shared access may benefit the support of persons with dementia and their care partners. Highlights Patient portal registration and use has been increasing among persons with diagnosed dementia. Two thirds of secure messages from portal accounts of patients with diagnosed dementia were identified as being authored by care partners, primarily using patient login credentials. Care partners who accessed the patient portal using their own identity credentials through shared access demonstrate similar levels of activity to patients without dementia. Organizational initiatives should recognize and support the needs of persons with dementia and their care partners by encouraging awareness, registration, and use of proper identity credentials, including shared, or proxy, portal access.

Patient Portal Use Among Older Adults With Dementia Diagnosis.

This cohort study assesses the level of engagement with an electronic health management system among patients with recently diagnosed dementia and their caregivers.

Cocaine-Induced Structural Plasticity in Input Regions to Distinct Cell Types in Nucleus Accumbens.

BACKGROUND: The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is a brain region implicated in pathological motivated behaviors such as drug addiction and is composed predominantly of two discrete populations of neurons, dopamine receptor-1- and dopamine receptor-2-expressing medium spiny neurons (D1-MSNs and D2-MSNs, respectively). It is unclear whether these populations receive inputs from different brain areas and whether input regions to these cell types undergo distinct structural adaptations in response to the administration of addictive drugs such as cocaine. METHODS: Using a modified rabies virus-mediated tracing method, we created a comprehensive brain-wide monosynaptic input map to NAc D1- and D2-MSNs. Next, we analyzed nearly 2000 dendrites and 125,000 spines of neurons across four input regions (the prelimbic cortex, medial orbitofrontal cortex, basolateral amygdala, and ventral hippocampus) at four separate time points during cocaine administration and withdrawal to examine changes in spine density in response to repeated intraperitoneal cocaine injection in mice. RESULTS: D1- and D2-MSNs display overall similar input profiles, with the exception that D1-MSNs receive significantly more input from the medial orbitofrontal cortex. We found that neurons in distinct brain areas projecting to D1- and D2-MSNs display different adaptations in dendritic spine density at different stages of cocaine administration and withdrawal. CONCLUSIONS: While NAc D1- and D2-MSNs receive input from similar brain structures, cocaine-induced spine density changes in input regions are quite distinct and dynamic. While previous studies have focused on input-specific postsynaptic changes within NAc MSNs in response to cocaine, these findings emphasize the dramatic changes that occur in the afferent input regions as well.