Publication date: Sep 19, 2025
Patient portals are increasingly used to support digital health engagement, but little is known about how caregivers used patient portals before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. To examine longitudinal changes in caregiver engagement with pediatric patient portals, focusing on logins, session duration, messaging behaviors, and provider response times across pre-pandemic, pandemic, and post-pandemic periods. We conducted a retrospective cohort study using de-identified MyChart data from caregivers of children aged 0 through 11 who received care at four pediatric primary care clinics in the Southeastern U. S. between March 2018 and March 2023. Generalized linear models were used to compare portal engagement across pre-pandemic, pandemic, and post-pandemic periods. Outcomes included login frequency, session duration, message volume, message types and recipients, and provider response times, all normalized per user per year. Among 478 caregivers, portal logins and session duration increased significantly during and post-pandemic, with 16-fold increases post-pandemic compared to pre-pandemic (p
| Concepts | Keywords |
|---|---|
| Clinics | Care |
| Logins | Caregivers |
| March | Covid |
| Models | Digital |
| Pandemic | Engagement |
| Increased | |
| Messaging | |
| Pandemic | |
| Patient | |
| Pediatric | |
| Portal | |
| Portals | |
| Post | |
| Pre | |
| Provider |
Semantics
| Type | Source | Name |
|---|---|---|
| disease | MESH | COVID-19 Pandemic |
| disease | MESH | burnout |
| drug | DRUGBANK | Tropicamide |