Walter Reed Army Medical Center's Internet-based electronic health portal

Background: Use of the World Wide Web (WWW) and electronic media to facilitate medical care has been the subject of many reports in the popular press. However, few reports have documented the results of implementing electronic health portals for essential medical tasks, such as prescription refills and appointments. Methods: At Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Search & Learn medical information, Internet-based prescription refills and patient appointments were established in January 2001. A multiphase retrospective analysis was conducted to determine the use of the Search & Learn medical information and the relative number of prescription refills and appointments conducted via the WWW compared with conventional methods. Results: From January 2001 to May 2002, there were 34,741 refills and 819 appointments made over the Internet compared with 2,275,112 refills and approximately 500,000 appointments made conventionally. WWW activity accounted for 1.52% of refills and 0.16% of appointments. There was a steady increase in this percentage over the time of the analysis. In April of 2002, the monthly average of online refills had risen to 4.57% and online appointments were at 0.27%. Online refills were projected to account for 10% of all prescriptions in 2 years. The Search & Learn medical information portion of our web site received 147,429 unique visits during this same time frame, which was an average of 326 visitors per day. Conclusions: WWW-based methods of conducting essential medical tasks accounted for a small but rapidly increasing percentage of total activity at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Subsequent phases of analysis will assess demographic and geographic factors and aid in the design of future systems to increase use of the Internet-based systems.