Welch William C, Mathew Melissa S, Welch Rachel L, McShane Brendan J
Neurosurgery, University of Pennsylvania / Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, USA.
Cureus. 2019 Jan 3;11(1):e3816. doi: 10.7759/cureus.3816.
Physician-patient interaction through email poses several concerns regarding the security, efficiency, and misinterpretation of critical information. Incoming emails received by a single university-based physician in 2013 were analyzed in order to determine whether a general non-patient specific email is appropriate for patient use. Emails received were divided into seven categories: Informational, Academic, Advertisement, Organization/Department/ University, Mission Critical, Personal, and Patient. A total of 9,102 emails were received and read by the physician, with an average of 25 emails per day, out of which 823 (9%) emails were directly sent by patients. The total time spent reading emails was five days, seven hours, and 24 minutes. General email is not an effective means of streamlining physician-patient communication. Non-essential emails, which represent a majority of incoming messages, decrease the productivity of physicians and prevent them from responding to urgent messages in a timely manner. Additionally, this creates the chance for critical patient information getting lost with the volume of received emails. This could be detrimental to patient care and satisfaction. Recently, an online portal was instated to provide a method of secure communication, and less than five patient emails were received in the physician's personal email since then.
通过电子邮件进行的医患互动引发了一些关于关键信息的安全性、效率和误解的问题。为了确定一般的非特定患者电子邮件是否适合患者使用，对一所大学的一名医生在2013年收到的 incoming emails 进行了分析。收到的电子邮件分为七类：信息类、学术类、广告类、组织/部门/大学类、关键任务类、个人类和患者类。该医生共收到并阅读了9102封电子邮件，平均每天25封，其中823封（9%）是患者直接发送的。阅读电子邮件总共花费的时间是五天七小时二十四分钟。一般电子邮件不是简化医患沟通的有效方式。占收到邮件大多数的非必要电子邮件降低了医生的工作效率，使他们无法及时回复紧急信息。此外，这增加了关键患者信息在大量收到的邮件中丢失的可能性。这可能对患者护理和满意度不利。最近，启用了一个在线门户来提供一种安全通信的方法，从那时起，该医生的个人电子邮件中收到的患者邮件不到五封。
