Dive Brief:
- While new electronic options for patient communications abound, only a minority of doctors are using them, according to a new study by TCS Healthcare Technologies, the Case Management Society of America and the American Board of Quality Assurance and Utilization Review Physicians.
- The 600-odd providers surveyed use the telephone (91 percent), face-to-face conversations (71 percent) or letters (74 percent) to communicate with patients.
- Only 15 percent used patient portals, 7 percent remote monitoring devices and 8 percent smartphone applications in their work.
- Doctors do use some communications technologies, however. For example, social networking use doubled to 9 percent from 2010, and use of text messaging nearly doubled over two years.Also, 54 percent of doctors use e-mail to communicate with patients.
Dive Insight:
While this study write-up implies that most doctors are technophobic, the data doesn't tell the whole story. Actually, there are good reasons why physicians haven't embraced portals, smartphone apps for use in care and remote patient monitoring.
Perhaps most importantly, most doctors aren't being paid for time spent on these technologies. Until more health plans decide to pay doctors for remotely monitoring a patient or coordinating care with an app, uptake will remain low.
Also, integrating these tools into their workflow may seem like a needless extra headache given the need to cope with evolving EMRs and the transition to ICD-10. Yes, there's value in new health IT, but at this stage in its evolution, these approaches just aren't easy or profitable enough to take the physician world by storm.