Missed outpatient appointments, or no-shows, disrupt care continuity, reduce clinic efficiency, and impact availability for other patients. Digital tools, such as patient portals, might improve appointment adherence by enhancing communication and engagement.1 MyChart, Epic’s patient portal, allows patients to schedule and manage appointments, receive reminders, and access care-related information and is the patient portal assessed for this study.
We studied more than 1.6 billion face-to-face outpatient visits in 2024, comparing no-show rates for patients with and without an established patient portal account at the time the appointment was scheduled.
Overall, patients with an active patient portal had a no-show rate of 6.2%, compared to 7.9% for those without, as seen in Figure 1. Patients aged 50–64 saw the greatest percentage point difference (6.2% vs. 8.7%) followed by those aged 35–49 (7.8% vs. 9.9%). Younger patients had smaller gaps, with the smallest difference seen among 18–34-year-olds (9.3% vs. 10.9%).
Converting this finding to a rate, approximately 1,700 fewer no-shows occurred for patients with portal accounts per every 100,000 scheduled visits. This equates to more than 21 million fewer no-shows in one year across the 1.26 billion scheduled visits among patient-portal users in 2024.
A sensitivity analysis accounting for other factors such as patient demographics, social vulnerability, appointment lead time, rate of no-shows in 2023, social drivers of health, insurance type, and number of recent visits showed similar patterns.
