UCLA Health Patient Health Tickler Email

Project Lead: Jose Arellano

Nudge Unit Team: Hengchen Dai, Craig Fox, Jana Gallus, Richard Leuchter, Silvia Saccardo, Sitaram Vangala

Collaborators: Jeff Borenstein 

Collaborating Department/Division: Office of Population Health & Accountable Care (OPHAC), Primary Care

Project description: One reason that patient portal-based messaging interventions have limited effectiveness at impacting patient behavior is due to patient portal letter read rates below 50%. We designed a prospective clinical trial evaluating how a behaviorally-informed email notification that is auto-generated when a patient portal message is sent will impact patient engagement with the portal. The RCT randomized ~10,000 patients per month to receive either the status-quo email notification about a portal message or a behaviorally-informed email:

• Personalized email that leverages urgency and is designed to pique patient interest

The primary outcome being measured is patient portal message read rates, and downstream engagement with the message is also being tracked.