Online care: Guidelines tame the wild Web

Practice issues addressed include how to handle patient e-mail and online consultations.

Editorial. Feb. 3, 2003.

For many physicians, venturing into online consultation has been the equivalent of moving to the Wild West in the 1800s. You know people are going there, and you know they'll be looking for care, but how do you operate your practice in a place that seems to have no rules?

Well, thanks to the efforts of the eRisk Working Group for Healthcare, the Internet frontier is a little less wild. The group has set guidelines covering physician use of the Internet for patient care and communication.

Its members have the collective clout to make a difference. The consortium consists of more than 30 professional liability carriers and medical societies, including the AMA, and worked in conjunction with the Federation of State Medical Boards. Also intimately involved was Medem, the physician Internet service owned by the AMA and a number of other medical associations.

The guidelines set standards for how to handle patient e-mail and how to handle fee-based online consultations, two increasing realities for physicians.

A 2002 Harris Poll showed that more than 70% of patients want e-mail access to their physicians' offices. The poll also showed that many patients are willing to change physicians to get the service, and nearly 40% are willing to pay for online contact with their physician.