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Patient Portal Messages Double, Doctors Face Rising Workload
- June 23, 2026
- Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter
More than 1 in 10 Americans now use patient portals and health apps to communicate with their doctor, a new study says.
Online portal messages from patients more than doubled between 2020 and 2025, researchers reported June 22 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
At least 12% of patients now use these secure portals to communicate with health providers about appointments, test results and ongoing treatments, the study found.
“Our study shows that use of patient portals, health apps and messaging are now a routine part of everyday patient care across America, not simply side channels used occasionally,” senior researcher Michal Mankowski, an assistant professor of surgery at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, said in a news release.
Such direct access to doctors is a boon for patients, but it also means that physicians will have to adapt if they want to avoid burnout, said researcher Dr. Dorry Segev, vice chair of surgery at NYU Grossman School of Medicine in New York City.
“Modern delivery of healthcare means increasingly that healthcare providers will have to balance their digital workload on top of their traditional clinical workload,” he said in a news release.
“Clinical staff will need to be trained in mastering the tools of messaging in healthcare; in using AI support programs, including chatbots that can frame content to minimize its complexity; and in making the most effective use of clinician time needed for online billing and online counseling,” Segev said.
For the new study, researchers analyzed communications through the Epic electronic health record system across 2,067 hospitals and 47,100 clinics between 2020 and 2025. During that time, more than 8 billion patient-provider interactions took place.
Results showed that patient messages have doubled since the pandemic, rising from an average pace of 2.2 per year in early 2020 to 5.4 per year in late 2025.
The number of Americans with an active Epic health record rose from 94 million in 2020 to 140 million in 2025, and 30% of active patients on Epic sent a portal message to their doctor during the first three months of 2025.
These messages haven’t led to a decrease in in-office visits, which averaged two to three a year per patient, researchers found.
However, phone calls to doctor’s offices did decline by 6% during the study period, researchers said.
“These findings indicate that asynchronous messaging has expanded alongside, rather than replaced, in-person and telephone care, resulting in a substantial increase in total communication volume and clinician workload,” says an accompanying editorial co-written by Dr. Joseph Ross, a professor at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut.
“The clinician’s electronic inbox is no longer peripheral, it is central to contemporary practice,” the editorial concluded.
Health systems need to acknowledge the rise in these electronic communications and give doctors time to respond, the editorial said.
“Failure to do so risks further shifting uncompensated, after-hours work onto clinicians or leaving patient attempts to contact their clinicians to go unanswered,” it said.
More information
The American Medical Association has more on what doctors want patients to know about portal messaging.
SOURCES: NYU Langone Health / NYU Grossman School of Medicine, news release, June 22, 2026; Journal of the American Medical Association, editorial, June 22, 2026
