Patient-to-physician messaging: volume nearly tripled as more patients joined system, but per capita rate plateaued. Health Aff (Millwood) 2014 Oct;33(10):1817-22
Date
10/08/2014Pubmed ID
25288428Pubmed Central ID
PMC4418542DOI
10.1377/hlthaff.2013.1145Scopus ID
2-s2.0-84907858329 (requires institutional sign-in at Scopus site) 40 CitationsAbstract
Patients want to be able to communicate with their physicians by e-mail. However, physicians are often concerned about the impact that such communications will have on their time, productivity, and reimbursement. Typically, physicians are not reimbursed for time spent communicating with patients electronically. But under federal meaningful-use criteria for information technology, physicians can receive a modest incentive for such communications. Little is known about trends in secure e-mail messaging between physicians and patients. To understand these trends, we analyzed the volume of messages in a large academic health system's patient portal in the period 2001-10. At the end of 2010, 49,778 patients (22.7 percent of all patients seen within the system) had enrolled in the portal, and 36.9 percent of enrolled patients (8.4 percent of all patients) had sent at least one message to a physician. Physicians in the aggregate saw a near tripling of e-mail messages during the study period. However, the number of messages per hundred patients per month stabilized between 2005 and 2010, at an average of 18.9 messages. As physician reimbursement moves toward global payments, physicians' and patients' participation in secure messaging will likely increase, and electronic communication should be considered part of physicians' job descriptions.
Author List
Crotty BH, Tamrat Y, Mostaghimi A, Safran C, Landon BEAuthor
Bradley H. Crotty MD Associate Professor in the Medicine department at Medical College of WisconsinMESH terms used to index this publication - Major topics in bold
Academic Medical CentersAdult
Electronic Mail
Female
Humans
Male
Patients
Physician-Patient Relations
