BACKGROUND
Mobile personal health record (mPHR) provides easy access to personal medical information and helps health management for patients. To ensure active utilization of the mPHR, it is necessary to provide user-customized functions by analyzing the usage logs. Asan Medical Center, a tertiary hospital in Seoul, South Korea, developed a tethered mPHR application called My Chart in My Hand (MCMH) in 2011 and upgraded the application to MCMH 2.0 in 2016.
OBJECTIVE
To investigate the usage trends and pattern according to user characteristics by analyzing a long-term log data of an mPHR application.
METHODS
We collected the log data of the MCMH 1.0 from January 2011 to November 2015 and MCMH 2.0 from February 2016 to May 2018. The access counts and trends in each menu were analyzed according to version-up by segmented linear regression analysis. The monthly average access count and monthly access count per user in each menu were compared according to age and sex using the Wilcoxon rank-sum test.
RESULTS
The total number of users of the MCMH 1.0 and MCMH 2.0 were 15,357 and 51,553. The proportion of males was higher than females (51.3 % vs. 48.7 %). But females under 50 (19-50 years) were the most prevalent user group (30.0 %). After version-up, the total access numbers of the MCMH (4,240,403 vs. 18,518,700) and access count per month (73,110 vs. 661,382) increased. “My chart” menu was the most accessed menu in all groups, and total number of access counts was steeply increased by approximately ten times after version-up. The median value of average monthly access also increased in all menus after version-up (P<.001) except for “Today’s medication”. The children and adolescent group accessed the “My chart” menu and the “Online appointment” menu more frequently than the other groups, and also showed the highest degree of increase in their access to these menus after version-up. The access counts of the “Health management” menu did not increase after version-up in children and adolescents and females 50 years or older.
CONCLUSIONS
In this long-term observation study, we found that use of the mPHR application increased over time and that a major update of the application accelerated this trend. The usage pattern of the mPHR and the effect of version-up were significantly different according to the user’s age and sex. The user characteristics revealed in this study may be helpful in developing mPHR applications.