Language Barriers and Access to Hospital Patient Portals in the US

Do hospitals offer patient portals with multilingual accessibility?In this cross-sectional study of 514 hospitals across 51 counties in 17 states, 99.4% offered patient portals; 29.4% of these provided access only in English, 59.7% provided access in English and Spanish only, 10.9% provided access in 3 or more languages, and only 4.7% offered portal access in the most common non-English, non-Spanish language of their respective counties. Multivariable logistic regression found that teaching (vs nonteaching) hospitals had higher odds of offering portals with multilingual access.These findings suggest substantial gaps persist that hinder portal accessibility for linguistically marginalized patient populations.

Corresponding Author: Debbie W. Chen, MD, Division of Metabolism, Endocrinology chendeb@med.umich.edu).

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