Diabetes care providers’ opinions and working methods after four years of experience with a diabetes patient web portal; a survey among health care providers in general practices and an outpatient clinic

BACKGROUND: To gain insight into the opinions and working methods of diabetes care providers after using a diabetes web portal for 4 years in order to understand the role of the provider in patients’ web portal use. METHODS: Survey among physicians and nurses from general practices and an outpatient clinic, correlated with data from the common web portal. RESULTS: One hundred twenty-eight questionnaires were analysed (response rate 56.6%). Responders’ mean age was 46.2 ± 9.8 years and 43.8% were physicians. The majority was of opinion that the portal improves patients’ diabetes knowledge (90.6%) and quality of care (72.7%). Although uploading glucose diary (93.6%) and patient access to laboratory and clinical notes (91.2 and 71.0%) were considered important, these features were recommended to patients in only 71.8 and 19.5% respectively. 64.8% declared they informed their patients about the portal and 45.3% handed-out the information leaflet and website address. The portal was especially recommended to type 1 diabetes patients (78.3%); those on insulin (84.3%) and patients aged< 65 years (72.4%). Few found it timesaving (21.9%). Diabetes care providers’ opinions were not associated with patients’ portal use. CONCLUSIONS: Providers are positive about patients web portals but still not recommend or encourage the use to all patients. There seems room for improvement in their working methods. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12875-018-0781-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.