A survey of patient access to electronic mail: attitudes, barriers, and opportunities.

The use of electronic mail (e-mail) is increasing among both physicians and patients, although there is limited information in the literature about how patients might use e-mail to communicate with their physician. In our university-based internal medicine clinic, we have studied attitudes toward and access to e-mail among patients. A survey of 444 patients in our clinic showed that 46% of patients in the clinic use e-mail, and 89% of those with e-mail use it at work. Fifty-one percent would use e-mail all or most of the time to communicate with the clinic if it were available, and many of the communications that currently take place by phone could be replaced by e-mail. Barriers to e-mail use include privacy concerns among patients who use e-mail in the workplace, choosing the appropriate tasks for e-mail, and methods for efficiently triaging electronic messages in the clinic.

[1]  Michael H. Zack,et al.  Electronic messaging and shared context in an ongoing work group , 1993, [1993] Proceedings of the Twenty-sixth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[2]  A. Hasman,et al.  Inter-Institutional Information Exchange in Healthcare , 1991, MIE.

[3]  J R Kassirer,et al.  Journals in bits and bytes. Electronic medical journals. , 1992, The New England journal of medicine.

[4]  M D Hagen,et al.  The utility of electronic mail as a medium for patient-physician communication. , 1994, Archives of family medicine.

[5]  C. Castagnoli.  Someone's been reading my E-mail! Privacy protection for electronic mail users in the US and the EC , 1993 .

[6]  M Hassett,et al.  Use of computer network bulletin board systems by disabled persons. , 1992, Proceedings. Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care.

[7]  J H van Bemmel,et al.  Electronic communication between providers of primary and secondary care. , 1992, BMJ.

[8]  D H Gustafson,et al.  CHESS: a computer-based system for providing information, referrals, decision support and social support to people facing medical and other health-related crises. , 1992, Proceedings. Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care.

[9]  Christine T. Kydd,et al.  Electronic mail, social presence and information richness , 1992, Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[10]  P F Brennan,et al.  Computer networks promote caregiving collaboration: the ComputerLink Project. , 1992, Proceedings. Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care.