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Recently, we have conducted a research on the topic of e-mail communication among patients and physicians. There is some data that we have collected through our healthcare portal for general public.

 

We asked potential patients questions related to the use of e-mail for their communication with physicians.

 

The questions asked and the results of the poll responses are the following:

 

Have you ever used an e-mail for communication with your physician?

 

 

Responders (n=251) were internet users, visitors of a healthcare portal www.ordinace.cz, aged 19-69, from both urban and rural areas, 72 % female, 28 % male.

 

The question here shows how these results would look like once e-mail communication and healthcare professional advice would start being reimbursed by healthcare security insurance, which is not the case yet.

 

In another poll, following the first set of questions, we have asked our portal visitors, what was their opinion is on the option of communicating with a physician via e-mail. The poll is still ongoing these days; however the first results show that 75 % of patients would very much appreciate such
a possibility however they do not have it (yet). There are more questions on this subject and also on the topic of personal data concerns. We will bring the detailed results on this poll to you next time.

 

Physicians´use of e-mail with patients

 

The use of email as a means of communication between patients and physicians will likely increase as the use of the Internet by general public grows continually. Yet, despite the evidence of increased interest among patients, the uptake of e-mail use by physicians for medical care has been slow.

 

Our next research which is to be conducted in October and November 2009 will focus on physicians´ attitude and behaviour concerning e-mailing with patients, to have relevant data for the European environment. Now, we can see some results from research conducted in 2006 in the USA, which brought the following results (Data from: Brooks RG, Menachemi N, Physicians’ Use of Email With Patients: Factors Influencing Electronic Communication and Adherence to Best Practices, J Med Internet Res, 2006;8(1):e2, http://www.jmir.org/2006/1/e2/): n = 4203, 689 (16,6 %) had personally used email to communicate with patients. Only 120 (2.9%) used email with patients frequently.

 

We will ask physicians a series of questions regarding the use of e-mail from the office, the time spent responding to e-mail messages from their patients. The expenses associated with e-mail consultation which are not being reimbursed yet, can be regarded as opportunity cost by some physicians. We want to find out if e-mails represent larger work and time investments than more traditional means of communication such as telephone or postal letters taken from the physician’s perspective.

 

Healthcare system responsiveness to patients’ preferences and needs: We want to be able to e-mail with our physicians.

 

As the overall European vision and tendency is calling for a high quality healthcare system with a patient being in the centre of interest, it emphasizes the need to be responsive to patient preferences and needs. The use of e-mail between physicians and patients can be definitively recognized as enhancing the communication and we can already see from our second poll preliminary results that it is generally favoured by many patients. There are several other studies of that were conducted among the general public that show an interest in e-mail communication with their physicians (Moyer C, Stern DT, Dobias K, Cox D, Katz SJ. Bridging the electronic divide: patient and provider perspectives on e-mail communication in primary care. Am J Manag Care 2002;8(5):427-433, Moyer CA, Stern DT, Katz SJ, Fendrick A. “We got mail”: electronic communication between physicians and patients. Am J Manag Care 1999;5(12):1569-1571.(.

 

By Vendula Machackova

Tags: eCustomers, eMarketing