Patient portal is an emerging healthcare technology that has shown promising effects in enhancing patient care experience and promoting patient health outcomes. Opal, a digital patient-centred portal, is currently available to patients at the Cedars Cancer Center at McGill University Health Centre (MUHC), providing real-time access to personal health information (upcoming appointments, clinical notes, lab results, etc.) in conjunction with the disease- and treatment-specific education materials. This project aims to quantify the initial impact of the Opal patient portal on operational and health-economic outcomes at the Cedars Cancer Centre. We leverage patient-level data from the Opal patient portal and MUHC. The primary method is to use propensity score matching to construct a matched cohort that compares operational outcomes and resource utilization between Opal users to non-users.

The planned outcomes of interest include missed appointments, emergency room visits, hospitalization, medical record requests, and fertility clinic appointments