Communications @ Risk

You get e-mails from your accountant about your current tax return. Your kid's school e-mails you about an upcoming fundraiser. Your lawyer e-mails you a copy of some estate planning documents to review. Your church bulletin arrives via e-mail as a PDF attachment. But there is at least one entity from which you are unlikely to receive an e-mail ' your doctor's office.

Physicians lag behind the general populace in embracing electronic communication such as e-mail as a way to interact with patients. Less than a third of all doctors reported e-mailing with patients in 2012. This was up from 27% five years earlier, according to an annual study by Manhattan Research of over 3,000 doctors. Further, few physicians text-message, although the number of those who texted rose from 12% in 2010 to 18% in 2012. “When Email is Part of the Doctor's Treatment,” Wall Street Journal, 3/25/13. Patients who use e-mail to communicate with their physicians are also in a stark minority. A national health interview survey conducted in 2011 showed that only 5.5% of the 30,000-plus Americans surveyed communicated with their healthcare providers via e-mail Id.

The Pros and Cons of Physician/Patient Electronic Communications

Increasingly, though, people, including patients frustrated with traditional means of communicating with doctors and medical offices, are e-mailing and even texting their service providers of all kinds. Many scheduling issues, prescription renewal clarifications or similar questions lead to phone-tag. Consider how maddening it is for a patient who phones the office with a question, having to leave a message for a doctor, nurse or assistant with the receptionist. She then waits by the phone, hoping to catch a return call that doesn't come promptly. When she goes back to her business, she misses the return call when it ultimately does come.

E-mail eliminates much of this back-and-forth, rendering physician practices more user-friendly. This approach to communicating with patients may therefore attract more patients to the practice and garner higher levels of patient/customer satisfaction.

Some doctors, already time-pressed, worry that if they move toward using electronic communications, they will be inundated with e-mails from patients who will pepper them with questions and trivial inquiries. Privacy breach headaches can arise with lack of encryption or inadvertent dissemination of private medical information. And letting members of the doctor's staff communicate by e-mail could create new opportunities for Murphy's Law to operate, risking dissemination of inaccurate information to patients. E-mail content or other electronic communications may potentially be misinterpreted or misconstrued, and could become another courtroom exhibit in a malpractice claim or lawsuit.

Managing the Risks

To address patient needs, some physicians are creating for their practices special patient “portals” to make and track appointments and to communicate with the doctor's office. To use such portals, patients typically need to sign off on some sort of consent agreement, but there are other ways that medical practices can use the latest communication technologies while protecting themselves from unnecessary risk. In next month's newsletter, we will discuss some of these strategies.

Kevin M. Quinley, CPCU, ARM, is Principal of Quinley Risk Associates' LLC, a risk management consulting firm. He is a member of this newsletter's Board of Editors. His book, Bulletproofing Your Medical Practice, is available from SEAK Inc. He can be reached at [email protected].

You get e-mails from your accountant about your current tax return. Your kid's school e-mails you about an upcoming fundraiser. Your lawyer e-mails you a copy of some estate planning documents to review. Your church bulletin arrives via e-mail as a PDF attachment. But there is at least one entity from which you are unlikely to receive an e-mail ' your doctor's office.

Physicians lag behind the general populace in embracing electronic communication such as e-mail as a way to interact with patients. Less than a third of all doctors reported e-mailing with patients in 2012. This was up from 27% five years earlier, according to an annual study by Manhattan Research of over 3,000 doctors. Further, few physicians text-message, although the number of those who texted rose from 12% in 2010 to 18% in 2012. “When Email is Part of the Doctor's Treatment,” Wall Street Journal, 3/25/13. Patients who use e-mail to communicate with their physicians are also in a stark minority. A national health interview survey conducted in 2011 showed that only 5.5% of the 30,000-plus Americans surveyed communicated with their healthcare providers via e-mail Id.

The Pros and Cons of Physician/Patient Electronic Communications

Increasingly, though, people, including patients frustrated with traditional means of communicating with doctors and medical offices, are e-mailing and even texting their service providers of all kinds. Many scheduling issues, prescription renewal clarifications or similar questions lead to phone-tag. Consider how maddening it is for a patient who phones the office with a question, having to leave a message for a doctor, nurse or assistant with the receptionist. She then waits by the phone, hoping to catch a return call that doesn't come promptly. When she goes back to her business, she misses the return call when it ultimately does come.

E-mail eliminates much of this back-and-forth, rendering physician practices more user-friendly. This approach to communicating with patients may therefore attract more patients to the practice and garner higher levels of patient/customer satisfaction.

Some doctors, already time-pressed, worry that if they move toward using electronic communications, they will be inundated with e-mails from patients who will pepper them with questions and trivial inquiries. Privacy breach headaches can arise with lack of encryption or inadvertent dissemination of private medical information. And letting members of the doctor's staff communicate by e-mail could create new opportunities for Murphy's Law to operate, risking dissemination of inaccurate information to patients. E-mail content or other electronic communications may potentially be misinterpreted or misconstrued, and could become another courtroom exhibit in a malpractice claim or lawsuit.

Managing the Risks

To address patient needs, some physicians are creating for their practices special patient “portals” to make and track appointments and to communicate with the doctor's office. To use such portals, patients typically need to sign off on some sort of consent agreement, but there are other ways that medical practices can use the latest communication technologies while protecting themselves from unnecessary risk. In next month's newsletter, we will discuss some of these strategies.

Kevin M. Quinley, CPCU, ARM, is Principal of Quinley Risk Associates' LLC, a risk management consulting firm. He is a member of this newsletter's Board of Editors. His book, Bulletproofing Your Medical Practice, is available from SEAK Inc. He can be reached at [email protected].