Communication between Physicians and Patients in the Era of E-Medicine

This year, my clinic began inviting patients to use a secure Internet link to communicate with physicians and staff members. Self-preservation was high on our list of reasons for establishing online communication. Our patients had become accustomed to contacting us through myriad routes: the clinic telephone, our individual office lines, the hospital paging system, our cell phones, the clinic fax machine, and in some cases, our home telephones. Secure Web messaging about routine issues was an attempt to direct round-the-clock communication into a manageable channel.Even before we initiated such messaging within a broader model of e-medicine, many patients had . . .