Patient portal messages climb significantly, altering care delivery

Patient portal messaging has climbed since 2020, underscoring a significant change in how clinicians deliver care, a national analysis of electronic health record data found. The study, published in JAMA Network Open and the first to examine changes in portal message volume at a national level, found patient-written portal messages rose from 0.99 per patient per year in 2020 to 2.5 in 2025, an increase of more than 150%. The researchers analyzed Epic Cosmos data from 2,067 hospitals and 47,100 clinicians. An accompanying editorial encourages health systems to allocate time for inbox management within clinician schedules. Otherwise, clinicians will need to answer messages after hours, contributing to burnout, or risk patients not receiving responses to their messages. (MedPage Today article, 6/22/26)