Online Access to Clinical Treatment Notes for Outpatients

An intra-individual comparison of patient-reported outcomes is planned for the intervention group. For this purpose, the pre-intervention survey of the intervention group is conducted upon inclusion in the study, the post-intervention survey at the earliest after the intervention has been used once (accessing their open note). Due to potential selection bias of the intervention group, which occurs due to voluntary participation in the intervention, a control group is surveyed at t0, which does not participate in the intervention, so that an adjustment for the systematic differences, if any, between the intervention and control group is possible at t0. The survey of a post-intervention control group (t1) serves to adjust for any time-varying effects so that a general time effect can be ruled out.