Emailing your doctor may not be as bad as you think. Which scenario causes a patient less stress? The awkwardness of the waiting room verses sending a question to your doctor over email, the latter choice may be much easier to your psyche. Take for example the joke below I've been getting in my email inbox for ages:
- - - - - - - - - -
An 86-year-old man walked into a crowded doctor's waiting room. As he approached the desk, the receptionist said, "Yes sir, what are you seeing the doctor for today?"
"There's something wrong with my dick," he replied. The receptionist became irritated and said, "You shouldn't come into a crowded doctor's waiting room and say things like that."
"Why not, you asked me what was wrong and I told you," he said.
The receptionist replied, "You've obviously caused some embarrassment in this room full of people. You should have said there is something wrong with your ear or something and then discussed the problem further with the doctor in private."
The man replied, "You shouldn't ask people things in a room full of others, if the answer could embarrass anyone." The man walked out, waited several minutes and then re-entered.
The receptionist smiled smugly and asked, "Yes?"
"There's something wrong with my ear," he stated.
The receptionist nodded approvingly and smiled, knowing he had taken her advice. "And what is wrong with your ear, Sir?"
"I can't piss out of it," the man replied. The waiting room erupted in laughter.
- - - - - - - - - -
Funny as this email joke about the elderly man's "ear-ache," may be, it mirrors the uncomfortable reality of most medical waiting rooms, pharmacies, and treatment clinics. Accessibility to one's healthcare provider online can be less stressful and a more practical means of contact for many patients. ''People are often more comfortable talking to a computer than they are to a doctor," says Dr. Delbanco, a professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School and the lead author of an article on doctors and e-mail in the current New England Journal of Medicine.(1) However, the convenience of emailing your doctor or clinic to ask your provider questions brings up a myriad of risks. As medicine and the internet have converged, concerns about protecting a patient's PHI (personal heath information) and EMRs (electronic medical records) have come to the fold.
HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act requires health care institutions to protect patient information. The Act outlines how this should happen, but does not make any firm recommendations about how to go about it. At the same time, strides are being made to make the electronic medical office a reality. "Office visits between patients and their doctors increasingly will take place not in person but over the Internet, through e-mail or even a video conference," Dr. Thomas Delbanco and Dr. Daniel Sands of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center stated in the April 2004 New England Journal of Medicine.(2) This means that seeking information online is now as common as dialing 411 a decade ago. From Drugstore.com to WebMD, the internet is where patients seek information on maladies to drug and herbal supplement information.
Patients aren't the only ones flocking to the net. Online use shows many within the medical field want to take accessing medical information a step further. Medical providers and patients alike wish to use the internet as a tool in their personal healthcare communications. According to Dr. Daniel Z. Sands, a primary care internist and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, "The internet will increasingly change patients' expectations of the clinicians, so that physicians will routinely need to offer services like e-messaging, instant messaging, video conferencing and other online services."(3)
Now is the opportune time for both patient and doctor to lay the ground work and find a balance in both patient's concerns over PHI and the immediacy of emailing their doctor. Looking towards the future of online healthcare means measures need to be put into place to protect a patient's privacy in order to securely implement the digital medical office.
- - - - - - - - - -
End Notes:
1.) Anahad O'Connor, "Take Two Aspirin, E-Mail Me Tomorrow," The New York Times, Section F; Column 5; Health & Fitness; LexisNexis 30 September 2005. 7.
2.) Liz Kowlaczyk, "Is Email The Future of Doctor-Patient Relations?," D2, The Boston Globe, LexisNexis, 27 April 2004.
3.) Dr. Daniel Z. Sands quoted in: Susannah Fox, Janna Quinney, Lee Rainie, "The Future of the Internet," Pew Internet and American Life Project, Published 4 January, 2005. 4.
About the Author
Marilee Veniegas is an alumni of the University of Washington she joined the Marketing team at Essential Security Software, Inc. in 2005.