Elderly patients with disabilities or chronic illnesses may not use the Internet at rates high enough to benefit from online access to electronic health records, according to a recent study in JAMA.
Based on survey results from 19,000 adults over age 65 and living independently, researchers found Internet use among the elderly to have increased from 21 percent in 2002 to 42 percent in 2010.
However, Internet use was inconsistent across the population. Just 10 percent of adults with functional impairments used the Internet in 2002, growing to only 23 percent in 2010.
"If you look at the subgroup of people functionally impaired, there was also a doubling [of Internet use] there but it was still remarkably low," the study's lead author, S. Ryan Greysen, MD, an assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco, told Reuters.
The researchers suggest providing voice recognition software or other tools to these patients to make Internet use easier may help boost their use of online patient portals.
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