An e-mail a day …

Sunday, April 27, 2008 | 2:07 a.m.

In the high-tech world of medicine, one piece of technology often goes unused by physicians: e-mail. Surveys of doctors have found that few use e-mail to communicate with their patients, despite patients’ desire to do so.

Physicians have cited privacy concerns and worries about adding to their workload, but the underlying reason many don’t use e-mail is they don’t get paid to handle patient requests via e-mail, or via phone calls, for that matter. Insurers pay only for face-to-face visits.

As a result, patients end up sitting in waiting rooms just to see a doctor so they can have a prescription renewed or be seen for a recurring malady.

In a meeting with the Las Vegas Sun’s editorial board Tuesday, Dr. Jim King, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, said there “need to be changes in the medical system because it is broken.”

His group is putting together a proposal that would give primary care doctors more time to work with patients by changing the payment structure. That would allow doctors to be compensated for such things as answering health questions or taking care of prescription refills via the Internet.

King, whose practice is in rural Tennessee, said by shifting the way doctors work, “quality of care goes up, costs go down.”

Two health insurance companies, Cigna and Aetna, are testing programs to compensate doctors for work aside from office visits, such as following up with patients via e-mail. As well, 36 medical practices across the country have been enlisted as part of a national study to change the way they work. The effort is designed to create medical offices that are “patient-centered,” using technology and management techniques to improve patient care and satisfaction.

Obviously, e-mails aren’t the answer to improving medical care, but creating a system that provides patients more access to their doctors and gives doctors more time to work with their patients certainly is.