Electronic medical records are becoming more common in doctor’s offices. One part of these software programs in some but not all electronic records is the online patient portal. These portals allow people to send messages to the doctor, get messages from the office, and review their tests and records.
It has been felt that use of these portals might make healthcare more efficient and reduce office visits, ultimately decreasing the costs of health care.
But…
The ease of using email communications is increasing the efficiency of many businesses, and our social lives as well. Many patients are emailing their physicians and the doctors are sending back answers.
But new regulations implementing 2 of our laws, HIPAA and HITECH privacy statutes, have now been finalized by the Department of Health and Human Services in January 2013.
These new rules indicate that it is a violation of the law for a physician…
Healthcare in America is becoming more complex. As described by M. Smith and coauthors in their recent article, “What’s Needed Is a Health Care System That Learns,” each Medicare patient now has an average of 7 doctors in 4 different practices, and each doctor must interact with over 200 other physicians to care for all of the practice’s Medicare patients. It is expected that the increase in chronic conditions by 26% between 2000…