SPOTLIGHT: Doctors slowly adopt patient/MD email

While a few doctors exchange occasional email messages with their patients, it's still a rarity, even among high-tech specialties. In a study done last year, about 25 percent of doctors said they regularly communicated online with patients, but that number isn't growing quickly. While patients are dying to email their doctors, doctors are very reluctant to participate, fearful that they'll get too much mail, violate patient confidentiality inadvertently, or miss important mail related to urgent health conditions. Of late, however, these concerns are being addressed, making it likely that we've reached the "tipping point" for patient-doctor email communication, one columnist suggests. Article

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