The Doctor's Office - WSJ.com

The Doctor's Office - WSJ.com: "Doctors Reluctant to Reach Patients Online
July 9, 2008

A patient paged me on a Saturday morning because he didn't understand how to help his wife prepare for a colonoscopy.

My assistant had explained it to him the week before, but he didn't get the summary sheet I usually hand out. Rather than give him instructions over the phone, I offered to email him within five minutes.

He was pleasantly surprised. A doctor had never emailed him before.

With the rest of the world hooked on electronic communication, doctors sometimes seem like the last holdouts. Most doctors I know seem unwilling or unable to make even email part of the way they practice medicine.
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[Doctor's Office]
If it were available to you, would you communicate electronically with your doctor? Do you think that charging for online consultations is fair practice? Share your opinion in an online reader forum.

I think there are two main reasons. The first is that email is another stream of information on top of phone calls, faxes and electronic pages from the hospital that the typical primary care doc has to contend with every day.

The other factor is the privacy and security laws known as HIPAA that scared docs from trying something new. They got the message you could be penalized for doing communications in"