ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Digit. Health
Sec. Connected Health
This article is part of the Research TopicDigital Health Innovations for Patient-Centered CareView all 43 articles
Implementation and Outcomes of a Digital Onboarding Taskforce in the Acute Care Setting
Provisionally accepted
Julianna LeNoir1*
Alexzandra Gentsch1Akshay Krishnan1Jeffrey Ndubisi1Marissa Witmer1
Kristin Rising1Brooke Worster1
Angela Gerolamo1,2- 1Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, United States
- 2University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Introduction: Use of digital health technology can improve patient health outcomes; however, not all patients have the knowledge and skills to download a health app and access a patient portal. Providing digital onboarding support to hospitalized patients has potential to overcome some barriers to accessing needed education in the community, including both having the time and a location to receive education. To address this, our team developed the Jefferson Digital Onboarding Taskforce (JeffDOT), a group of staff and students who approach hospitalized patients and provide one-on-one teaching on how to sign up for and use a patient portal. Methods and Materials: This descriptive study examined the implementation and preliminary outcomes of JeffDOT. We collected patient demographics and assessed health literacy, digital health readiness, and empowerment using the patient portal after patients received individualized support with portal enrollment. Results: We enrolled 343 hospitalized patients from a large academic medical center in the U.S. in their patient portal. Almost half of the sample (49%) was older than 55 years, 56% were male, 34% were Black, and 19% spoke Spanish at home. After receiving individualized support from the JeffDOT team, the majority of patients (84%) reported that they felt empowered to use the portal and almost half reported that they would be very interested in additional basic computer skills training if offered by the hospital. Discussion: Our findings suggest that supporting hospitalized patients with enrollment into a health portal using a primarily student, volunteer-staffed model is feasible and acceptable to patients. Future research should focus on the impact of JeffDOT on patient outcomes and health behaviors.
Keywords: Digital health1, patient porta2, telehealth3, patient education4, digital literacy5, health technology access6, patient-centered care7
Received: 02 Jun 2025; Accepted: 01 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 LeNoir, Gentsch, Krishnan, Ndubisi, Witmer, Rising, Worster and Gerolamo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Julianna LeNoir
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.