Digital Health Tools Are Reshaping Healthcare in the United States

NEW YORK, June 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- At least 12 percent of Americans now communicate with their healthcare providers about appointments, test results, and ongoing treatments via secure online patient portals and health apps, a new study shows.

Meanwhile, traditional, in-person visits to the doctor's office have rebounded since the pandemic. And although digital medicine has become a routine part of healthcare, it is supplementing rather than replacing in-person care. This evolution, researchers say, is reshaping how hospitals and clinics operate daily.

These are the main conclusions of the study, which was led by researchers at NYU Langone Health and represents the largest review ever performed on communications recorded by Epic electronic health records. The team's analysis involved more than 140 million patient records from 2,067 hospitals and 47,100 health clinics in the US. As part of the study, the researchers evaluated over 8 billion patient-provider interactions that took place between January 2020 and December 2025.

Publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) online June 22, the study team found that online portal messages more than doubled between 2020 and 2025 (by 153 percent). By contrast, total telephone calls decreased by 6 percent over the same period. The number of Americans with an active Epic health record went from 94 million in 2020 to 140 million in 2025. Thirty percent of active patients on Epic (42 million) sent a portal health app message to their clinician during the first three months of 2025.

Patient portal visits, however, are not replacing in-office visits, which have returned to an average of between two and three per year per patient. Messages from patients to healthcare providers have doubled since the pandemic, from an average pace of 2.2 per year in early 2020 to 5.4 per year in late 2025.

"Our study shows that use of patient portals, health apps, and messaging are now a routine part of everyday patient care across America, not simply side channels used occasionally," said study senior investigator Michal A. Mankowski, PhD.

Dr. Mankowski, an assistant professor in the Department of Surgery at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, said the study demonstrates that patients now have much more direct access to physicians and other clinicians.

"Our findings reveal that while digital health tools have become a core part of healthcare, delivery is becoming more continuous, timeless, and no longer tied to scheduled appointments during routine work hours," said Dr. Mankowski.

Among the study's other findings was that since 2020, Americans have, as logged in Epic record systems, booked at least 1.77 billion in-person visits to health clinics, sent 1.34 billion messages to their healthcare providers, and received some 3.25 billion online portal messages from providers. Also documented in Epic were 1.59 billion telephone calls and 146 million virtual telehealth portal visits.

Study co-investigator Dorry L. Segev, MD, PhD, said that the digital delivery of healthcare does not replace the old ways of working; it just adds another layer of more steps to existing workflows. To manage this new patient reality, hospitals, clinics, and healthcare workers have to plan future staffing and support.

"Modern delivery of healthcare means increasingly that healthcare providers will have to balance their digital workload on top of their traditional clinical workload," said Dr. Segev, a professor and vice chair in the Department of Surgery at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. "Clinical staff will need to be trained in mastering the tools of messaging in healthcare; in using AI support programs, including chatbots that can frame content to minimize its complexity; and in making the most effective use of clinician time needed for online billing and online counseling," said Dr. Segev, who is also a profession in NYU Grossman's Department of Population Health.

Already, he noted, NYU Langone uses AI support tools to speed up drafting of physician and provider notes.

Dr. Segev said the team next plans to look more specifically at digital-use trends within healthcare systems, including NYU Langone, to break down any regional and outpatient clinic-specific shifts that could affect operational planning.

For the study, the team used Epic Cosmos, a national dataset of the electronic health records of more than 300 million American patients. The dataset includes information from a majority of hospitals and clinics that use Epic, the nation's largest vendor of electronic health record systems, which had no role in performing the study.

Funding support for the study was provided by NYU Langone.

Along with Drs. Mankowski and Segev, NYU Langone researchers involved in the study were lead investigator Jane J. Long, MD, and co-investigators Mara A. McAdams DeMarco, PhD; Mark D. Schwartz, MD; Joshua Chodosh, MD; and Eric K. Oermann, MD.

Dr. Mankowski was recently elected to serve on the governing board of Epic Cosmos. Dr. Schwartz reported being president-elect of the Society of General Internal Medicine. Dr. Segev has received consulting and/or speaking honoraria from Sanofi, CareDx, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Roche, Optum, OrganOx, Hansa, and Biosidus and is a journal editor for Springer. None of these activities are related to the current JAMA study. NYU Langone is managing the terms and conditions of these relationships in accordance with its policies and procedures.

About NYU Langone Health
NYU Langone Health is a fully integrated health system that consistently achieves the best patient outcomes through a rigorous focus on quality that has resulted in some of the lowest mortality rates in the nation. Vizient Inc. has ranked NYU Langone No. 1 out of 118 comprehensive academic medical centers across the nation for four years in a row, and U.S. News & World Report recently ranked four of its clinical specialties No. 1 in the nation. NYU Langone offers a comprehensive range of medical services with one high standard of care across seven inpatient locations, its Perlmutter Cancer Center, and more than 330 outpatient locations in the New York area and Florida. The system also includes two tuition-free medical schools, in Manhattan and on Long Island, and a vast research enterprise.

MEDIA CONTACTS:

At NYU Langone Health
David March
[email protected]
212-404-3528

Study DOI
10.1001/jama.2026.8690

SOURCE NYU Langone Health System