Doctors and patients will, more and more, be communicating via the internet, over secure sites onto which they will log. Change is coming more slowly than many would like, but it's happening.
"An estimated 80 percent of Americans with Internet access would like to communicate with their doctors by e-mail, according to a HarrisInteractive Health Care Poll done in March 2005. That said, doctors have been slow to make use of the technology.
Only about one in four physicians reported that e-mail was used in his or her practice to communicate with patients in 2004-05, according to a study released a few months ago by the Center for Studying Health System Change, a health policy research organization in Washington. That was up from one in five in 2000-01."
One of the problems is that doctors aren't compensated for time spent on the phone or sending messages over the internet (not email, since it has to be specially encoded). I am remembering how stupid it was to get the results of an MRI in person, taking time off work, parking in downtown Boston, only to have a discussion with the doctor I could have easily had over the phone. This is the kind of stuff that absolutely must change for health care in this country to be effective and efficient.
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