Emailing With Doctors

from the good-for-administrative-stuff dept

A year ago we had an article about why doctors don't use email with patients. Now, a study has been done in an area where doctors and patients were encouraged to use email to communicate and they found that there were some very positive results. However, there were also some problems. Those behind the study noted that it was only the relatively wealthy who signed up, and that this could "widen the gap" between good medical care for the wealthy and poor medical care for the poor. It's also no surprise that they said email was really only good for administrative "nuts-and-bolts" questions. When it comes to actual medical issues, a full appointment was still needed. However, for making the administrative stuff much easier, people on both sides seemed to find email very effective.
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  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 18 Jun 2003 @ 5:15pm

    No Subject Given

    I'm a typical guy, and I don't like going to the doctor even when I know I probably should. Anyways, if I had a free email contact system so I could describe my symptoms and ask if it's serious enough to come it, I'd probably feel more likley to come in, like 3 weeks ago when my left arm was going all numb, and my heart was beating all wierd-like -- took me a week to decide to go in. - she didn't know what that was and I'm feeling fine now, but still, I probably should've come in sooner.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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