• Posted August 25, 2026

Want A Doc To Respond To Your Portal Message? These Tips Will Improve Your Odds, Study Says

Hoping for a quick response from your doctor to a message sent through your patient portal?

Then keep it cordial and positive, a new study suggests.

Doctors were more likely to respond to messages that addressed them by name and had a positive tone, researchers reported Aug. 24 in JAMA Network Open.

“One of the most important writing-style features was the message’s salutation,” lead researcher Mitchell Tang said in a news release. He is an assistant professor of health policy and management at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York City. 

“Simply beginning a message with ‘Dear Dr. Tang’ seemed to make it much more likely that Dr. Tang would end up responding,” he said.

Portal messages have become a routine way for patients to communicate with their health care team. However, many of these messages receive a response from a nurse practitioner or physician’s assistant rather than from the doc, researchers said.

“Unbeknownst to many patients, these messages do not usually go directly to their doctor’s inbox,” Tang said.

Instead, messages go through a “triage” process in which other care team members review them first, determine their urgency and complexity, and decide whether to send them on to the patient’s doctor for response, researchers said.

“In many message triage systems, nurses and medical assistants must quickly assess messages and make judgments about their urgency, complexity and need for escalation,” Tang said. “Given those constraints, writing style may understandably influence how messages are perceived and prioritized."

For the study, researchers analyzed more than 3.6 million patient portal messages from more than 511,000 patients, examining them for features like length, formality, sentiment and greeting style. 

Results showed that certain specific factors made it more likely a doctor would personally respond, including:

• A greeting that included either their last name or both their first and last name

• A positive sentiment, as opposed to a neutral or negative tone

• A more lengthy message, with those of 100 words or more receiving greater attention

On the other hand, some differences in writing style had surprisingly little impact on whether a doctor responded.

For example, the number of exclamation marks or question marks in the message didn’t seem to deter doctors, the study found. Doctors also were just as likely to respond to messages that didn’t say “please” or “thanks” as to those that were more polite.

Reading level also didn’t matter. Notes written at a third- to sixth-grade level were as likely as those at a college level to receive a doctor’s response.

Results showed that historically marginalized groups tended to have lower response rates from doctors. For example, Black patients had a response rate nearly a nearly 4-percentage points lower than white patients.

People whose preferred language was not English, those with less education and people on Medicaid or Medicare/Medicaid also tended to receive fewer direct responses from their doctors, results showed.

However, analysis revealed that writing style accounted for some of this gap in response rates, including:

• 48% of the difference between Black and white patients

• 35% of the difference between Hispanic and white patients

• Nearly 61% of the difference between those with a high school diploma versus a college degree

• 43% of the difference between Medicaid patients and those with private insurance

“The findings could help health systems identify potential sources of bias in portal-message triage and develop more equitable approaches to digital communication,” Tang noted. “But they are also a reminder to think about how communication style can influence the way we perceive and respond to people — not only in health care, but in our everyday lives.”

More information

South Shore Health has more on writing portal messages to your doctor.

SOURCES: Columbia University, news release, Aug. 24, 2026; JAMA Network Open, Aug. 24, 2026