Physician-patient email communication nearly triples in study

E-mail volume between patients and physicians nearly tripled between 2001 and 2010 at a major academic health center, according to a study published in Health Affairs.

Researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Johnson Health Center in Lynchburg, Va. and Brigham and Women’s Hospital analyzed the volume of messages at Beth Israel Deaconess’s patient portal from 2001 to 2010. By the end of 2010, 49,778 patients (22 percent of the system’s patient population) had enrolled in a portal and 36.9 percent of enrolled patients (8.4 percent of all patients) had sent at least one message to a physician, according to the study.

Physicians received almost three times the number of e-mail messages through the course of the study period. However, the number of messages per hundred patients per month stabilized between 2005 and 2010, at an average of 18.9 messages.

“As physician reimbursement moves toward global payments, physicians’ and patients’ participation in secure messaging will likely increase, and electronic communication should be considered part of physicians’ job descriptions,” wrote lead author Bradley H. Crotty, director of patient portals in the Division of Clinical Informatics, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School, et al.