Online Without a Net: Physician-Patient Communication by Electronic Mail

Abstract

Patients continue to find new ways of reaching their physicians. In the past, patients and their health care providers developed relationships through the course of everyday affairs and across a wide variety of social exchanges. Although other methods of communicating were introduced into the medical context, telephones, pagers and voicemail all retained some connection to individual voices. Moreover, medical practitioners and patients alike never anticipated that these technologies would substitute for genuine personal interactions. Nor did they anticipate that another new technology, electronic mail (e-mail), would shift communications back in time to the days when letter writing formed the basis for diagnosing and relating. E-mail in medical practice has already begun to reconfigure the patient-physician relationship in the electronic age.