sábado, 10 de agosto de 2013

Email usage among HCPs to communicate with patients continues to vary | Pharmalive

Email usage among HCPs to communicate with patients continues to vary | Pharmalive

Email usage among HCPs to communicate with patients continues to vary


By Mia Burns
Although the Internet has become ubiquitous in healthcare, with email being one of the top tasks that healthcare providers perform both on computers and mobile devices, using email to communicate with patients remains uncommon. Emailing patients raises issues of confidentiality and accountability and can also be time consuming. Kantar Media has released its Sources & Interactions Study: Medical/Surgical Edition in which 28 percent of physicians surveyed reported using email communication with patients.
The physician assistant/nurse practitioner version of the study showed that the percentage is actually slightly higher among nurse practitioners. The percentage of physician assistants using email to communicate with patients was lower than both doctors and nurse practitioners. The percentage of nurse practitioners that email with patients increased 6 percent year-over-year, while physician assistants barely showed any movement since 2012.
Younger physicians tend to use email to communicate with patients as frequently as older physicians, according to Kantar Media's Healthcare Research Team.  Among those under 35 years of age, 27 percent use email to communicate with patients, as do 30 percent of those 35 to 44 years of age, 29 percent of those 45 to 59 years of age and 24 percent of those 60 years of age or older. Forty five percent of key opinion leaders use email to communicate with patients more than other physicians.
“I know that from speaking to a number of physicians that more and more of them are communicating with their patients by email,” Peter Shaw, M.D., CMO at QPharma, Inc. told Med Ad News Daily. “The risks are potentially huge because how do you know that the person emailing you is the person that they say they are. Doctors have to be extremely careful if they give personal information back to the patient by email.”
The Physician Assistant/Nurse Practitioner Edition, conducted every year, is designed to profile physician assistants' and nurse practitioners’ media use in these areas of interest to healthcare marketers and media professionals. The data collection took place via mail questionnaires between January and March of this year in addition to an online survey this past March. A portion of the sample received an original mailing in January and a follow-up in February, while the other portion of the sample received an email invitation to an online survey in March.

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