In the context of this post email means: email between physicians, physician office to physician office email and organization email  to physician email.
There is a wide spectrum of technology adoption (AKA browser, keyboard and email comfort level) by physicians affiliated with our organization.  There are those who do not use email and have no desire to use ever it (this is a minority) In contrast there are physicians that use email every day, even throughout the day via notebook pcs and  hand held devices such as the Treo, Blackberry or iPhone.

The physicians’ comfort level and skill with the keyboard, mouse and Internet browser is significantly inter related to their perception of web application and intranet usability. Further, this mouse and browser comfort level is influential to the physician adoption of email into their respective daily work flow.

In our organization all physicians either have a corporate email address or are entitled to have one upon request. Corporate email addresses are more frequently used by physicians who have dual administrative  and clinical roles or frequent business communication within the organization. It would be a generalization, but relatively safe to state that the largest volume of physicians using corporate email to communicate are the financially integrated physicians. While general medical staff and specialty physicians tend to use personal email addresses to communicate with one another about non clinical topics.

To assure the protection of personal health information (PHI) our organization utilizes a secure email gateway. This provides a solution for a physician with a corporate email account to send confidential, private communications and information that may due to its referral or collaborative purpose, contain personal health information securely to another physician. The physician receiving the secure email can be using a personal email account to receive the prompt that they need to securely access the gateway to read the content within the message. For example, a physician can send a secure email by simply prefacing his / her email’s subject line with the text “secure:”. An example subject line might read, “secure: Patient j jones blood work results”.

Most physicians affiliated with our network have personal email accounts such as Yahoo, MSN, AOL. These email accounts may be specific to the physician or be a family email account that is shared. As well these personal email accounts change, new ones are added.

This train of thought leads to the discussion of; what data / information should be communicated via email and what data/information should be communicate via the intranet or a portal? Further, what criteria should be used to discern this question and whom can or should make this final determination?