Messages, Strands and Threads: Measuring Use of Electronic Patient-Provider Messaging

Communication is critical to patient care, and electronic patient-physician messaging is an important, rapidly emerging medium for seeking and delivering health care. Measurement of such messaging is essential to understanding its effect on other modes of health care utilization, assessing provider workload, and may have implications for provider compensation. To advance analytic techniques, we offer definitions and methods for measuring patient-physician messaging activity. We illustrate their application with health-related messaging from a large integrated group practice tied to a health maintenance organization in the Pacific Northwest.