Physician-Patient Email Communication on Rise

A new study from Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) offers some early insights into the effects of increasing numbers of emailed communications on doctors, suggesting that reimbursement models and physician workflow may need to adjust to accommodate message management.

The results were published online in Health Affairs.

“BIDMC was one of the first hospitals in the country to create a patient web portal providing a secure platform for patients to view parts of their medical record and send emails to their clinicians,” said lead author Bradley Crotty, M.D. “The portal became available in 2000, so we were able to take a 10-year look at the data and examine the email traffic resulting from this new use of technology.”

From 2000-2010, nearly 50,000 patients enrolled in BIDMC’s patient portal, representing about 23 percent of all patients cared for in the system.