The causal relationship between portal usage and self-efficacious health information-seeking behaviors: Secondary analysis of the health information national trends survey data

Abstract

Background: Patient portals have drawn much attention, as they are considered an important tool for health providers in facilitating patient engagement. However, little is known about whether the intensive use of patient portals contributes to improved management of patients' health in terms of their confidence in acquiring health information and exercising self-care. There is a lack of randomized trials with these outcomes measured both pre- and postadoption of patient portals. Objective: The aim of this study was to examine the causal relationship between the usage of patient portals and patients' self-efficacy toward obtaining health information and performing self-care. Methods: This study was a secondary data analysis that used data from a US national survey, the National Cancer Institute's Health Information National Trends Survey 5 Cycle 1. Patient portal usage frequency was used to define the treatment. Survey items measuring self-efficacy on a Likert-type scale were selected as the main outcomes, including patients' confidence in obtaining health information and performing self-care. To establish causality using survey data, we adopted the instrumental variables method. To determine the direction of the causal relationship in the presence of high-dimensional confounders, we further proposed a novel testing framework that employs conditional independence tests in a directed acyclic graph. The average causal effect was measured using the two-stage least squares regression method. Results: We showed that frequently using patient portals improves patients' confidence in obtaining health information. The estimand of the weighted average causal effect was 0.14 (95% CI 0.06-0.23; P