Why Doesn’t Your Doctor Email You?
By Anna Johnson on October 27th, 2009Your lawyer does it. Your accountant does it. Heck, even your hairdresser may do it. So why isn’t your doctor doing it? That is, communicating with you via email or their website?
Recent research indicates that consumers would welcome, with open arms, the opportunity to use email and doctors’ websites to communicate with their doctor in order to save time and money. Unfortunately, the average doctor doesn’t seem to have realized this yet…
Over half of the respondents to a study by Lightspeed Research said they would be willing to use email to engage in a variety of routine interactions with their doctor, such as receiving routine test results (59 percent), requesting a repeat prescription (53 percent), confirming an appointment (53 percent) and updating their doctors on an existing condition (51 percent). They were also open to using doctors’ websites for such interactions.
Yet, despite consumers’ willingness – and the overwhelming logic of performing such tasks online – the average family doctor still isn’t offering patients the ability to communicate by email, website, text or online chat.
There’s simply no excuse! For all the many, many health-based websites out there… where are the doctors? If they don’t want to send sensitive information via the Internet (despite the ability to do so securely) why aren’t they at least sending simple emails or text messages confirming appointments?
Oh, and let’s add any number of other medical providers to the list. Okay, maybe, due to the enormous demand for their services, doctors and other health providers don’t see any need to offer patients Internet based value-adds, but if the situation ever changes, the Internet surely offers a way for the average family doctor to differentiate themselves from the rest.
(Apologies to health providers who do make extensive use of the Internet… and congratulations for being at the forefront of your profession in this regard!)
